


A Night to Remember

by mariagonerlj



Series: A Night to Remember [1]
Category: Little Women - Alcott
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:38:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 38,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariagonerlj/pseuds/mariagonerlj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>In which Jo confronts her fears and remembers the end of her courting.</p>
          </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

This miniature epic was written simply because I was too fascinated by the thought of Jo and Laurie having a wedding night to desist from writing one out. Damn my perverse psyche! In any case, I somehow managed the stretch the details of one night-- and the courting that led to it-- into SIX chapters. Here is only the first.

Please enjoy the read!

Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 1  
Fandom: Little Women  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Amy, Fred, Cast  
Rating: R, Later NC-17  
Note: If you can't handle fairly explicit future descriptions of beloved children's book characters having sex, this may not be the fic for you. Not that I blame you for misgivings, naturally!

***

For much of her life, the young Miss Jo March-- no, scratch that-- the youngish Mrs. Josephine Lawrence often thought of herself as a rather reasonable human being.

Of course, there were a few (and _just_ a few, no matter what her new husband might believe) people who held an opinion quite to the contrary. There were even certain members of her own family who (if pressed) would admit that the newly married Mrs. Theodore Lawrence balanced an admittedly sharp mind with a wit that could draw blood with her tongue and a temper that could have made a dragon feel flighty. And if Mrs. Lawrence wasn't in a rotten mood from having been reminded of as much-- which was naturally unlikely, given this topic of conversation-- she might have even admitted that said people might have a tiny smidgen of a point. Intermittently.

Even her new husband, who adored her with a passion she found nearly as inexplicable as it was intoxicating, would have chuckled over the idea of his wife having a sweet temperament and reminisced over the many, _many_ times in their life where her temper had managed to get the better of them. And moreover, if evidence was wanted to support his laughter, he had more than enough examples from the day they had met till the day they had wed-- up to and including the moment during their wedding when she had nearly punched him in the arm for teasing her about purposely wearing so opaque a veil to hide herself from everyone's scrutiny.

Regardless of such faults, however, Josephine Lawrence-nee-March usually considered herself to be a sharp, bright, canny young woman whose soaring flights of artistic whimsy were well balanced by her more practical side. And more often than not, even her doting husband would have to agree that such a description suited her-- which was only one of the many reasons she had married him eventually.

But as Jo stared into her mirror (which reflected pale, frightened, still alarmingly gawky reflection that looked almost indecently clad in the cream-colored nightgown that her sister Meg had made for her for her wedding night), only one coherent thought managed to flow through a mind that usually worked far more clearly.

And it was as followed.

_My God. I am the single, most solitary, and _ stupidest _creature on the good Lord's green earth for believing I could pull off being married to Teddy properly. What exactly is it that I think I'm doing?_

***

If the part of her that still remained sensible wanted to answer the question, it would have to admit that that wasn't even the best question to ask. After all, it would remind her if she allowed it to speak, being married to her old friend couldn't have been any more difficult than the process of agreeing to be married in the first place. Strange as her current dilemma was, it was no stranger than realizing that Jo March-- a girl long predicted to grow up to be a literary spinster-- had not only ended up married after all, but had also wed one of the most eligible bachelors her county had ever seen.

For one, outside of the giddy romance novels she herself wrote to make a living from time to time, it was exceedingly rare for handsome, charming, kind, and alarmingly wealthy young men to actually fall for-- let alone marry-- young, penniless, artistic women who they had passed their younger years with happily. And even then, when those matches did tend to happen, those young women tended to be model females in other ways, with enough feminine charm and astonishing beauty and prim, well-bred manners to make up for a lack of a dowry. Even in her own stories, Jo's quick mind and mad imagination couldn't quite justify matching a veritable prince or protagonist to a woman who couldn't match him in grace or beauty.

In short, Jo had long since realized that exceptionally desirable young men like her new husband tended to fall in love with women more like her sisters Meg or Amy than herself. Even in the wildest of novellas that she had penned for serials, she had never dreamed that anyone like her dear Laurie could fall for a cantankerous, impolite, high-spirited, unconventional, overly imaginative woman-girl who was still more than capable of running about in a wild frenzy at the age of twenty-two when inspiration hit her and who, even on her best days, rather looked like a gawky scarecrow plastered with the awkward facial features of a pygmy. The very thought of such a pairing seemed akin to mating a majestic unicorn with a knock-kneed, limping donkey.

Yet, for all her hopes and fears, she _had_ married someone almost the whole society would consider far above her means. He in turn had been resolutely stubborn in pursuing her, despite all the unspoken prohibitions that should and could have kept them apart despite their own mutual, slow-burning feelings. And though it had taken her a very long time to realize it, she loved her new husband deeply as well, even if she'd been too ridiculously stubborn and scared of change and insensible to the tender clip of Cupid's arrows to realize it in the first place.

In the end, they had still manged to come together and make their halting way toward each other, despite all the obstacles that had littered their path previously. Despite her turning him down during his first, heart-breaking proposal for her hand. Despite the three years of enforced separation that had come between them after that. Despite the fact that he had spent all too long being a dissipated wreck in Europe and she had spent equally long being a miserable struggling artist in New York. Despite the fact that it had only been the terrible illness suffered by her sister Amy that had lured the both of them back to where it had all began and led them toward a sort of fairy tale ending...

Well, something in Jo ran hot and cold with both wistfulness and relief at the thought of their story together, at the the thought of how they had began as friends and almost ended their chance of happiness through mutual blindness and grief. Who, after all, could have predicted that their lives together and apart would have one day brought them to the point where she was fretting over being with him on their wedding day, instead of watching him stand up at the altar with someone else entirely?

At the age of sixteen, after all, Jo wouldn't have thought that she would one day end up married to her dearest friend were all the world being offered up in response to a correct guess. At the age of eighteen, she had refused to allow herself to even entertain the notion that her dear friend Laurie's slow laughter and tender eyes and fleeting touches could favor her above all the other women he could possibly meet. And at the age of nineteen, she had turned down his proposal despite the way it had turned some part of her inside-out to do so, sure that she was sparing him the pain of eventually regretting his inexplicable passion, even as the sight of his broken eyes and halting steps away had haunted her thoughts continually.

If life had not been kind to them, their lives together likely would have ended at that spot-- with her standing in that glen, tears already collecting in her eyes, haunted by that sense of what could have been, what would never be, ifs and whens and how comes, unkept promises and broken dreams.

Perhaps they would have eventually found their way back together; there was still Amy, after all, and Jo had never been blind to the soft blush that colored her youngest sister's cheeks when she spoke of Laurie in halting, fevered tones. Perhaps he would have married their way into their family, eventually, or simply became an old friend who would write solemn, meaningless letters to her once in a while, merely to keep in touch.

And yet, they would never had what they had in that moment in the woods, blind to everything but each other. Her hand in his and his lips turned to hers and the whole world stretching before them like paradise... a paradise she had told herself once would be folly to reach.

But life and fate, or chaos and chance, had been far kinder in sparing them both from such futures. Though Amy falling so ill in Europe had caused a great deal of panic and worry at the time, it likely was the only reason Laurie would have had to escort the youngest March sister back to the family home in Massachusetts, barring Laurie actually marrying her and carrying her back triumphantly. But instead of bringing back a blushing wife, he had arrived at Jo's door-step with a fevered patient, one who had needed all of Jo's patience and cajoling and tenderness and worry to bring her back to the world of the living.

And that was how their story had begun again, really.

***

It had been a wet, cloud-strewn, bleary day in early spring when Laurie had arrived with his near-bride, with a pale and unfamiliar looking Amy by his side, looking as gray as the skies in the evening. A letter had come about his intentions a few days ago, and while her parents worried incessantly about their youngest daughter, Jo had spent her days crumpling paper and breaking the tips of fragile quills she could barely afford in the first place, wondering what would happen when he came, wondering what he would have to say and what she would have to see.

At first, she had even allowed herself to expect that his task of bringing her sister home would be one that he would carry out swiftly, cleanly, like an executioner garroting a hanged man efficiently. She had even found herself praying that her old friend-- though friend was a strange word to put to a man she had not hear a word from in years-- would leave as soon as he had done his solemn duty and he had left Amy with her family. Their first terrible meeting together-- which she had spent avoiding his eyes and bustling off to bring endless cups of tea for her sister-- had been excruciating enough. It seemed as though all he could do when she was about was tighten his lips into pale, thin lines and stare at her as though she were a cruel dream, or a lying phantasm, or merely the mocking edge of a memory.

She had hoped, more than anything, that her Laurie, the best friend she had ever had at one point in the world, would eventually, blessedly leave.

But he had stayed.

He had moved back into his grandfather's manse next door.

And he told them all that as long as Amy needed him, he had finally found a woman worth keeping.

And with that, Jo had felt as though he had struck a blade deep into her breast and watched as she had struggled with it as deeply as he had done once, when she had refused him three years previously.

It had been, on the whole, a miserable few months when he first entered her life once more and made himself neighborly, as though fashioning himself into a model brother-in-law for Josephine March to compensate for far stranger feelings. At first they had been cold to each other, chilly and overly polite, Jo's own mixed tenderness and mounting sadness towards her oldest chum dashed by Laurie's cool responses to her overtures of friendship and rediscovery.

Then, within a week, Laurie had suddenly become much warmer-- only in the worst way possible, as he began to alternate paying a restless, almost reckless courtship of Amy with paying attention to Jo in a way that made blood rise to her cheeks in embarrassment and fury. He would tease, provoke and follow her about, as though to get a rise out of her continually from acts as outrageous as sending off to Paris for silken sheets for her sister, or turning half the neighborhood about in his search for the perfect bouquet for his darling. In some ways, it was as though Laurie was deliberately trying to draw her into the spectacle he was making of himself and Amy, to show her the thousand small attentions he would have paid _her_ had she the mind to accept him after all of his pleading.

A few weeks after, it had simply gotten worse when Laurie had invited a friend of his and Amy's, Fred Vaughn, to visit them in their mutual captivity. Although Fred had initially been an admirer of Amy's, he had seen the way Laurie paid court to her and chosen to back away judiciously, a tactic Jo envied him in entirely. And naturally, seeing how hopeless his former suite was, he turned his attention more toward Jo, though to this day, she still refused to believe he felt anything more than utterly understandable sympathy. And perhaps out of her own loneliness and need for a chum, Jo had reciprocated his feelings.

Fred and she had, she admitted, a rather unlikely friendship-- but was it truly any more so than the one that had existed between herself and Laurie previously? Jo herself hadn't thought so herself, though the comparison somehow made her feel oddly guilty. But that aside, after weeks of Laurie being something between a sore nerve and a nuisance, it had been a genuine relief to slip out of the house that Laurie and Amy were fast becoming love-birds in to take a walk with a new friend who spoke to her so kindly. He, after all, had seen the most magnificent sights of Europe, had read so many of the novels that she loved herself, and had experienced an education that Jo's eager mind was happy to dip into continually. They hadn't rambled about in the puppyish manner that she and Laurie had once spent their afternoons in... but he offered her a quiet companionship that she took to quite happily. And in turn, while Jo didn't delude herself into believing his fond words meant anything more than sincere affection, she did want to believe that Fred continued to visit the March house partly for her sake. His kind heart _had_ realized what she had been going through as the man she... might still care for had began making love to her sister in earnest.

And though she had not known why at the time, Laurie had seemed to take deathly offense at that.

It simply hadn't made any sense then, though Jo had spent weeks wracking her brain to understand it. Laurie had all but placed streamers around Jo's house proclaiming his intent to marry Amy after her illness had past and Amy herself, though she seemed strangely listless, seemed to mostly agree. But as time had gone on, and she and Fred had become closer, Laurie's chill deepened into a winter of manners. Mere coldness became actual rudeness-- one that she often found herself protesting against furiously.

For a while, it seemed as though the two of them were fighting a cold war of attrition-- a battle that neither could win with ease and that both seemed in danger of losing. It was a battle that may have involved brutal words instead of blades and grimaces instead of guns, but it nonetheless felt deadly, as though every encounter of theirs was threatening to smash through something. And though they had the sense to tone themselves when it came to the eyes of others, especially those of her parents, it almost felt as though they lived in a sealed world of their own thorny relationship when they were together-- one where only they and the unresolved questions of their true affections had mattered, and their heart were ever of the verge of shattering.

It had all come to a head almost three months into their strange, mutual captivity, after he had finally brought Amy home to where Jo had broken his heart previously. Fred had offered her the long-awaited chance to go to Europe with his younger sister, as a companion to her, once he had realized how deeply Jo still smarted over being denied her chance because of Amy. They had been near the stairs, lingering close to each other as Fred had reached out to companionably clasp her hand-- something that he had never done before, though she had not pulled away, telling herself that it did not matter, that Laurie's opinion meant nothing. And she had still been caught between joy, surprise, and honest thankfulness when Laurie had seen them, flushed scarlet all over, and then retreated to the attic, as though intent on ambushing her eventually

And just like that, Europe hadn't mattered quite so much. Not when she had had enough and needed to understand why Laurie was the way he was. Not when her famous temper was raging at the contempt she had momentarily seen in his eyes. And not when she had the chance to dismiss a disappointed Fred momentarily and shake the truth straight out of the confounding man who now wanted to be her _brother_ before he married permanently into her family.

So she had headed up the attic, armed only with her wits-- a weapon that felt paltry indeed when she remembered the look in his eyes, the cruel curve of his lips, and the resounding clamber of his feet.

The confrontation hadn't gone as Jo had planned. Truth be told, nothing had. Where she had expected he would confess that he had simply been driven to a short-temper by Amy's illness, he had sworn that he had _her_ to blame for all of his mental lapses. Where she had hoped that he would agree to be happy that she finally had the chance to see Europe, he had swore that doing so on Fred's dime would only demean her entirely.

And where she had hoped (and of course it was only _hope_) that he would swear that his heart belonged to Amy and it was time to now mend his friendship with Jo...

He had finally looked at her with an honest gaze. He had finally shook his head no. He had finally stepped forward and touched her, his fingers like steel against her collar, as though trying to make her seem real.

He had finally told her that he had tried and failed. That he couldn't force himself to love another. And that he still wanted _her_\-- Jo-- _her_, even after trying everything he could do delay his bastardous, unwanted feelings.

He had asked her, "And you don't feel any differently, do you, Jo? You still don't feel anything for me?"

It was difficult to say anything with her heart in her teeth, but something in her eyes must have given it away regardless. Something in her gaze that had made his breath strangle in his throat, that had brought the strange glimmer of hope back to his eyes, that had made him step forward hopefully.

And when he had reached out to press his quivering lips against hers, she had pressed herself back, damning herself momentarily.

She had never been kissed like that before, not by Laurie himself, not even by any of the men she had met as she had wandered through New York's strange streets. He had nearly frightened her then by the depth of his passion and the force of his embrace-- but she could no more have wrenched herself from him than she could have moved against gravity or the seasons. His lips and his teeth and his hands and his tongue had nearly crossed the lines between pain and pleasure... but neither had _she_ held back. She could still remember the pattern that her nails had left upon his neck as she had flailed and raged and kissed him back, hating herself for doing this with him and almost hating him as well... and yet, still driven mad by the sound of his breath, by the rasp of his tongue against her collar, by the rough pressure of his hands against her shoulders trembling. And he had sighed and whispered and moved against her, the beat of her heart tangible against his palm and the depth of his desire so painfully apparent that Jo felt as though she could drown in it eventually.

It was a kiss that could have lasted seconds, or moments, or even several hours. Jo had lost sense of all time, and the world beyond their mingling bodies, as she was lost within it, as though his love were a storm that she could sink into fully. And when he had pulled away, his eyes shattered and his lips wet and all of him hopeful and open and trembling...

She had told him: "I can't betray my sister like this."

And he had looked at her with those dark, frantic eyes and whispered: "You are going to be the death of me."

***

**Author's Note**: Reviews and constructive criticism are, as always, much appreciated!


	2. Setting the Scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jo confronts her fears and remembers the end of her courting.

Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 2  
Fandom: Little Women  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Amy, Fred, Cast  
Rating: R, Later NC-17

***

Ever the gentleman, Laurie proposed to her sister soon afterward, after three terrible days of allowing Jo to look and look and look at him, and wonder why it had all gone so wrong, slipping through her fingers so soon. And on the day when he finally went up to Amy's room with a ring box in his hand and a glaze to his eyes, Jo had exiled herself out of the doors, braving the wind and wet rocks in search of shelter from her feelings. Leaving behind even her new companion, she had rambled through the woods in a listless daze, feeling vaguely as though the sickness that Amy had suffered had settled on her by some strange transitive act, wondering if it was only fair to feel as though her heart had been smashed open by someone who she had hurt previously.

He loved her. She couldn't deny it to herself anymore. He said he loved her completely.

She loved him. She knew that now. She knew that she loved him thoroughly.

And he was going to marry her sister, even though what they knew now made the act seem like blasphemy.

But it was still the right thing to do. It was the _only_ thing to do. If they had any honor left to them, they would let the marriage Laurie had sought after so proceed quickly.

They couldn't smash Amy's heart, after all. Not after an illness that had nearly carried her away from them. Not after these months of his courtship. Not after the long years of the two of them being estranged, he hating and she repressing, moving from each other hastily.

In light of that, a few moments of stolen tenderness shouldn't mean anything.

He loved her and she loved him and it didn't matter, it couldn't matter, they would have to forget it completely. And with her face buried in her hands and her ears filled with the sound of her muffled sobs, she only realized that he had caught up to her last when his gentle hand had touched her back, eased to her shoulder, cupped the nape of her neck as though in search of new discovery.

She had known the heat of his hand just as well as she knew she could not enjoy it any longer. And she had not even been able to look at him when she had asked, in a muffled voice she could barely recognize as her own, "Have you two decided when you will be married?"

"Jo," he simply said in reply, and his voice had a strange sort of breathlessness to it, as though he himself were still in a dream. "Jo, Jo-- my love, my dearest! Jo, please _look_ at me!"

Caught by her own morbid curiosity, she had, even as her eyes had blurred with further, treacherous tears. She could still remember being struck by the wild rapture in eyes she had thought would hold only sorrow, that were instead filled by both hope and fear.

His voice had been startlingly soft when he had next spoken, the pads of damp fingers already wiping away the sullen trails of her tears. She could still keenly remember the confusion she had felt, wondering why he hadn't been as broken as she was, wondering if she'd misread their second kiss in the first place, if there was something she was still missing.

But then he had spoken and she had understood why his voice had been so warm, why his eyes had been so tender, and why even the fingers framing her face had seemed so at ease.

"Jo, she refused me," Laurie began, and her grave gray eyes widened abruptly. "Your sister-- our Amy-- absolutely refused me! She told me that marrying me would be folly for both she and I, and that I should direct my question somewhere else entirely. And all I want to know now is if you..." He lost his voice for a moment, his eyes snaring within them hers, his tongue running against his full bottom lip nervously. "If you will give me a similar answer, if I-- if I repeat my question here."

For a moment, she couldn't quite understand what he was saying, her mind still filled thoughts of her sister's refusal, of everything she had expected and feared suddenly, abruptly changing. She couldn't even shake the shudder from her voice when she found it. "I... Teddy... _Teddy_, please don't toy with me now! Are you... did Amy truly...?"

Any misgivings she might have still had were easily washed away by the look on his face now, as he moved his handsome face closer to hers, his color high and his lips curving into that blush-worthy smile, his voice was sweet and throaty. "She was meant to be an painter after all, my dear girl. Like any good artist, she knew what was in our hearts earlier than we did. She told me she didn't quite have the energy to fend off the ridiculous charade of a courting I was heaping on her for the longest time but... she does now. She said that she knew I wanted something else, and truthfully, that made her want something else as well. I'm a free man, dearest. I can do anything! I mean... I mean, as long as..."

She could read the sudden hitch in his voice as though she were a fortune-teller. All of a sudden, it was so clear and easy.

"As long as we love each other?" she whispered, her unsteady hands coming to rest against the ones that were now caressing her swollen cheeks, in a clasp both tender and sincere. "Teddy... Teddy, I..." Another ridiculous welling of tears came to her eyes, though she hastily wiped them away before they could impede her again. "I... I know what I feel for _you._ But how do you really feel about _me_?"

At first, he seemed almost awestruck that she would have to ask such a question... though this clearly gave way to a laughing incredulity which led him to bend his curly head down to her lower one so he could kiss her wrinkled brow gently. "You silly goose," he said, half laughing, "just when I thought that you couldn't be more of an adorable fool, you had to prove me wrong yet again." (She had to snort at that, even through her ridiculous tears.) "I love you, Josephine March. At this point, it's all but engraved in stone. I love you and I want to hear you say that you love me too. That's all I could ask of anybody I love. Especially when I love them this completely."

She was beginning to smile herself, then, though disbelief still caught her by the throat, even as she shifted closer, allowing him to more properly hold her. "If... if it's engraved on a tablet somewhere, my boy, you must promise to show it to me eventually. It might be the only way I'll ever believe you when you say such mad things."

Because it had still seemed too good to be real. When, exactly, had she ever gotten just what she wanted? All her life, what she loved seemed to want to leave her. Forever looking after her little Beth, finding a way to be happy in Europe, being a writer that mattered in the world... dreams, all of them, just like loving Laurie had been. And none of them ones that had come true either.

Why would this be any more permanent? What could make this more real?

From the sigh he gave, Laurie was clearly annoyed, though his fingertips were undeniably loving as they moved against her face, as intimate as the next kiss he placed against her crooked beak. "If I have to act as Moses himself and seek out a burning bush to prove it, I swear Jo, I'll do so. But haven't you realized already? All this time when I was courting your sister and being an undeniable monster to you-- Lord, Jo, I only acted that way because I was _trying_ to stop loving you, because I thought I had no hope and that way would lead to more misery. I had convinced myself I had to hate you to forget you, and for that reason, I wanted _you_ to hate me too. But if... if you feel something for me as well... if what we shared in your attic meant anything at all..."

Feeling suddenly shy, she had chose to close her eyes momentarily, to rest her forehead against her-- she no longer knew how quite to describe him-- her friend's cheek so she could evade that piercing gaze of him for a moment longer. "I'm... I'm just glad you don't honestly despise me, Teddy. For some time, I truly thought you _did_. God, sometimes it seemed as though you were only a few minutes away from leaving me tied to a set of train-tracks with no rescue in sight. And when you saw Fred speaking to me about Europe..."

Shame burning in his eyes, Laurie had grasped her hand in his, bending his lips so that they could trace their warm surface over every one of her slim fingers in an apology he clearly thought mere words could not make up for. And it was only when she was slightly breathless by the stir of his warm lips against her shivering skin did he direct those inescapable eyes towards her, accompanied by a beseeching smile. "Then you must forgive your boy for being an utter fool. I was jealous, Jo-- utterly and completely consumed by it. I thought he had somehow done what I couldn't and managed to capture your heart. The very thought of it tore me apart, nerve by nerve, until I couldn't think properly."

Even with her breath trapped in her throat, she had almost laughed-- before she realized how very sincere he truly was. "Oh, Teddy, you didn't! Oh, I can't believe you actually thought...! How could someone like Fred, someone who could have his pick of women, actually decide to pay so much attention to a rattled old spinster like me?"

Laurie flashed a rather rakish smile at her in turn, one that was accompanied by the sudden stroke his fingers against the tight curve of her jaw. "Oh, I don't know... I don't think I do so poorly by women myself and I chose you, after all. Twice, even. Needn't that count for something?"

It was enough to make Jo flush a furious red and stamp on his foot, which Laurie took with good nature. "Oh, don't start saying such ridiculous things when we're being serious, Teddy! And dear Fred and I are simply friends. He was... well, he was a help to me when we were quarreling the most. When he offered to take me to Europe, it was as a companion to his sister, not... not in..."

Not in the way that Teddy had offered. Not as a new bride on her honeymoon, traveling in her marital suite.

The sudden darkening of Laurie's eyes and the lowering of long, sooty lashes showed how clearly the thought had overtaken him as well. But after a long pause, he continued speaking solemnly. "Be as it may, it doesn't alter the fact that I was a fool and a brute to you both. Jealousy did not alter my character for the better. I hated every moment he spent with you, begrudged every touch and word that passed between you. And I did this even as I courted your sister while trying to pretend that towards you, I felt nothing. Can you ever forgive your foolish boy, my Jo? Dare I hope slightly?"

She could. Lord yes, she could. Which was why, eyes shining, she had eased towards him for the first time for a kiss... one she had thought would be quick, tender and affectionate but soon turned into a thing of low, raw animal hunger. She had assumed it would be over after a brief, delicate moment, as their first had-- but Jo soon found herself pressed against a majestic old oak as Laurie took his time exploring her mouth, his hands low on her hips and her own fingers buried in his curly hair, shaking wrists rattling against his skull in a way that might have hurt.

Something very hoarse and needy in Jo told her that he didn't seem to mind at all and thanked him for it profusely.

His kiss was slow and tender, torrid and a terror, and Jo half thought she might very well disintegrate completely as he restlessly ran his fingers up and down her sides, his body pressing against her as the heat within them built up to an crescendo they had not the means to overcome. And even as she melted against him, as pliable as she had ever been in all of her restlessly stubbornly life, she realized that this was the first time he had ever kissed her as though time alone was of no essence, as though all the world could very well wait while he held her close enough to feel her heart-beat parallel to his own, as though he was finally reassured that she would not pull away or leave in the precious moments that came after.

And indeed she didn't, though she had flushed and laughed and ran her fingers over kiss-swollen lips after, not quite sure what had happened in their embrace but all too aware that it had only ended out of propriety. "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But only if..." (And this was interrupted by another gentle, lingering kiss that brought a most becoming flush to her lover's-- her _lover's_!-- face.) "...If you can forgive me in turn for what I did to you in these woods three years ago. Oh, Teddy... I've hurt you so, far more and far longer than you hurt me. If there was something I could do to help you now..."

He interrupted her by placing another fierce, swift kiss on her lips, one that he seemed to force himself not to prolong. "There is, my loveliest. There is. Say that you'll help me make up for the past. Say that you'll take me back. Say that you'll let me court you properly-- in the way I should have done all along. I don't need you to agree to marry me now, Jo. I know that it shall take time enough for the memory of my foolhardiness to wear off. But if you could just give me the chance to undo what I've done wrong..."

Confused, dizzy and somehow deliciously disoriented, Jo let her eyes slide shut and her cheek come to a rest against Laurie's shoulder, happy but also feeling a little lost. "But Teddy... my sister turned you down just now. Do you really think now is the best time to think of marriage again? Don't you need to... to..." (She was stumbling over the words-- oh, why could she think of them so well when writing, only to have them abandon her when she needed them the most?) "To... to heal a little bit more, before starting it again all over?"

But instead of pausing to think about her idea, as she had half-hoped and half-feared, her Laurie simply laughed again and nuzzled his cheek to hers. "Well, they do say laughter is the best medicine, and _no one_ make me laugh as much as you do." (She made a face at that, which punctuated his point with his chuckle.) "Dearest, what could help me get over my tragic inability to make Amy mine as your antics would? What else could make me heal?"

Jo couldn't quite decide whether she was more annoyed or amused by his ridiculous answer. "Oh, Teddy, please be serious! I mean..." And then, more seriously, she pulled back to look at him carefully, her voice becoming a little softer and far more hesitant than he was used to hearing. "I mean... I haven't gotten any prettier over the years." (He looked ready to interrupt angrily at that but she firmly shut him up with a finger to his lips, which diverted him well.) "I truly haven't gotten any more better or beautiful. I'm still a wild mess at parties, I still have the manners of a stunned elephant and I still have the cooking skills of a dead sea-gull. I can't dance, sing, play or be a good society wife. If we were to marry-- if, if you truly _wanted_ me-- Teddy, I can't give you what whatever it is that your wife should have. I'll just end up embarrassing you!"

And all along, even as he had kissed her, some small, fearful part of Jo had been waiting, just waiting, for him to prove her right. For him to admit that what she said made all the sense in the world. For him to nod and turn away his incomparable eyes and tell her, _Yes, Jo, You're right. As a chum and a friend, you may be fine, but who on earth would consider_ you _a good wife? I should go back into the house and beg your sister to take me back after all. She would suit me properly_.

But that part of her would be disappointed yet, even as the rest of her soared swiftly. For her Laurie's gaze were full of a love that both dwarfed her and lifted her up when he peered into her eyes after she finished speaking, his lips still wet from her own and his fingers gentle against her shoulders.

And then he spoke and she realized why it was that this was the man she would live and die for, in all the years she had left to her.

"You have yourself, Jo, and that's all I need from all the world before us. I've loved you since I clapped eyes on you and there are no arguments in the world that you could make to dissuade me from such a thought. Because I need you. Because I _adore_ you! Because you can shake sense in me, no matter how demented I may be. Because the only way I have to measure time is by being and not being with you. And because if you will not let me love you, Josephine Marsh, then all the world is a jest that I've already lost, and nothing else within it can possibly be worth winning."

As if to assure her that that was so, he cupped her shaking little hands in his face once more and pressed his lips to hers, murmuring against her mouth as though to cleave her to what was absolute. "I will love you until the day I die, you mad, bizarre, brilliant little woman. Swear that you'll be kind to me just this once, Jo. Swear that you'll take a chance after all."

And when her upturned lips met his in a kiss, she assented in a way that mere words could not hope to match.

***

All of that had happened only three months ago. And a mere three days ago, after a few sweet, awkward months of a true courting that had both confused and comforted the rest of the family, they had finally wed near the old March home, her father bewildered and her mother bemused and his grandfather simply beaming. Even Amy-- dearest Amy!-- had looked more wry and tolerant than shocked and heart-broken, calmly dismissing Fred from their home soon afterward and rather dryly discussing opportunities to study art in America that her new brother-in-law might want to bank-roll after he was done getting married. With a particular woman friend of hers from Europe in tow to keep her virtue intact, naturally.

("Well," Laurie had said to Jo soon after, "I know I owe my present happiness to your sister's tolerance as much as anything else... but I can't help but be surprised by her particular _guest._ Although I suppose now my masculine pride is well assuaged by knowing just why she turned her down. Apparently, excellent insight into my heart wasn't the only reason she refused my-- and even Fred's-- ring."

"Hmmm?" Jo had asked, looking up from her frantic search for a quill to finish writing guest invitations with. "Teddy, what on earth do you mean?"

His only reply had been a bemused quirk of his lips. "If you don't understand yet, it isn't my place to tell you, dear heart." And before she had been able to needle what made him laugh so out of him, Laurie had fallen on her with a flurry of kisses that had knocked away all other thoughts with ease.)

And so, she and her love had wed in a ceremony that would have scandalized Aunt March if she had deigned to come, what with the bride being so giddy that she rushed through vows she had written herself with loving haste and the groom waltzing around in such tender disarray that he had been barely able to speak. They had nibbled white cake from each other's trembling fingers and danced with him compensating for her ungainly figure and held hands under the table as their guests had greeted them, looking surprised but also pleased. And afterward, their first few days of wedded bliss had consisted of an array of visits and parties in and around the March's house and his grandfather's manse, which had necessarily curtailed the sincere (if nerve-wracking) intimacy that marriage would naturally bring them.

But three days into their mad escapade into marital bliss, they had finally moved into a temporary house that they would occupy as a young couple before moving to New York permanently. And all of the above and more was why Jo was now finding herself hovering anxiously over a reflection that may have worn the gown of suitable for a wedding night but with a bride within it that looked desperately ill at ease.

Which was the dilemma, of course, that had brought on this evening's uncharacteristic melancholy over her want of beauty and complete lack of preparation for what lay ahead.

On the whole, Jo truly wasn't a vain person. She had her pride, of course, and it was a pride that could burn fiercely, especially when it came to matters of her person and writing. She managed her work with a fierceness that often made Laurie tease her so, but respect her integrity all the same. And when it came to being true to her own inner nature, Shakespeare himself might have admired her bone-deep refusal to pretend to be something other than what she was in her entirety.

But when it came to looking at herself in her reflection and finding something wanting...

Well, that wasn't exactly unusual for Jo. She had lived her twenty-two years on earth very certain in the knowledge that she was the least fetching of all the girls in her family. Meg had her elegant figure, Amy her gold-tinged form, and even Beth had had something of a medieval angel about her dear, delicate face. Only Jo had come into the circle of her family with a portable loveliness that could be easily traded for train-tickets.

Her lack of beauty had never bothered Jo greatly before, not when she knew she was loved and loved well by people who could care less about the crook in her nose, or the unwieldy slant of her brow, or even her generally shapeless waist. In fact, the only time she could recall being greatly cross was when her Aunt had spurned her as a companion in favor of the prettier Amy, an injustice she had burned at at the time but reconciled to eventually.

Most of the time, Jo dealt with her looks with far, far more ease. But then, she had never been married before either-- and most definitely not to a man who had almost certainly been with other women before-- far prettier women, most likely, with gold-spun hair and green-hazel eyes and the sort of luxurious figure that could have waltzed through a handsome young emperor's royal harem without a braided hair out of place--

Oh, Jo so hated having a vivid imagination some days.

Well, it wasn't hard to feel both old doubts and new insecurities rushing back to her, not after Amy had whispered stories of Laurie's supposed debaucheries in Europe whilst he had set about on his rage-fueled courting. Scrambled news of some of the madness of Europe and Jo's own active thoughts had filled in the rest, and the moments she hadn't spent over the last few days with Laurie actively pressed against her flesh had been spent worrying about what to do when they actually... they honestly would...

With a groan of despair, Jo turned from her reflection in the mirror and buried her face in her hands. If she couldn't even _say_ it, how could she be brave enough to go _through_ it?

Jo curled her fingers against the cool, silver mirror and plunged on desperately.

She had spent far too much time worried about what would happen when she and Laurie would-- say it! albeit not aloud!-- finally _consummate_ their marriage.

After all, she was nobody's idea of perfect loveliness and she hadn't even been able to _dance_ with her husband at the reception gracefully. She knew feminine grace and beauty had a vast _something_ to do with what a man and his wife were expected to do, which only made her all the more nervous of the night ahead. After all, if she lacked those qualities in her characteristically flamboyant way, what could possibly make her think that laying with her husband tonight would be nothing short of disastrous?

It was one thing, of course, to indulge in a few kisses here and there, knowing there would be nothing between them that would go beyond it. Even when those kisses had been-- and yes, once she ceased flushing over it, she could admit it-- even when Laurie's lips and hands had brought her to the edges of ecstasy and madness, there had been a peculiar sort of safety in knowing that the edges were all that there was to be skirted. They may have spent hours over the last few months by themselves-- hours that they had spent laughing and reminiscing and caressing and touching, as though mere words would mean nothing without punctuation in the form of touch-- but those were somehow safe hours all the same. And even in those moments when Jo had thought he might just drown within her, where his hands had defied propriety by reaching beneath her skirts, where he had shocked her by caressing her ankles as he had ran his lips against a pale insole he had liberated from her slippers, his lips tracing the line of her stocking as his glittering eyes slowly caught hers--

Even during those times, Jo had known he would never press her far beyond society's demands, even as it had seemed to grow harder and harder for him to shift his hips from hers during their mad and prolonged bouts of rollicking half-love. After all, she had had the right, the _responsibility_ even, to push his hands and lips and dear, wanting face away from her whenever he went too far. It may have meant ignoring his sad, doleful sighs as he had done so-- and that strange, tender ache that he stirred in her skin-- but after a few months of Laurie's intimate courting, she had rather mastered the actions.

But Jo had never before had to confront actually performing for him, actually exposing herself _to_ him, actually allowing him to hold her with the clear goal of his release in sight-- all while knowing that if she fumbled even once--

The eyes she gazed at in the mirror were now wide and worried, desperation and desire twined together.

What if she lay with him and he didn't care for it? What if he saw her fully and he realized this wasn't what he wanted?

What if she disappointed him enough to make him dread being with her for all the rest of his existence?

She wanted so much to be a good wife, a loving bride, to make make him laugh against her throat and break their silences with his pleased sighs and murmurs, that devilish dark spark of mischief burning bright in his gaze again. She just wished she knew how to bring it about when she truly needed it, rather than hope that chance and her unreliable instincts could end up pleasuring him.

For all the love stories that she had written, Jo knew truly little about fulfilling the appetites of men. And never had she felt the sting of lacking that secret knowledge as deeply as she currently did.

But after another moment, Jo fixed her eyes upon her vanity mirror again, taking in a deep, solemn breath. She could not allow this to defeat her any more than any other trouble in her life had. She had faced and conquered far darker dragons, and she could endure this strange torment. After all, whatever else he was, Laurie was and had always been a man of a deep and sincere passion that she had yet to repay him. In turn, whatever else _she_ was, Jo could not stand to be a complete coward-- not again, not when it came to him. And though part of her might have quailed as she thought of what her husband would think when he finally saw her naked before him, bare to his view and ready for his touch, Jo knew she had to confront the moment soon enough.

She might be gawky and and awkward and undeserving of her Laurie... but still she was his, as he had always been her. She always had been his, even before she could bring herself to realize it. And right now, she wanted to be all of his in a way that defied even her well-worn fears.

So, after giving herself one last look of desperation and courage in the mirror and curling her damp fingers around her lap, she called out for her husband... who, after all, had already been waiting three long years for this (wonderful? terrifying?) moment.

"Teddy," she said, in a firm, clear voice that thankfully did not give away how shot her nerves were. "Teddy, I'm done dressing for bed. You can come in."

And after a moment's worth of shivering anticipation, her husband, her best friend and the man she had been waiting for all her life finally, finally did.

***

**Author's Note**: Reviews and comments are, as always, very appreciated!


	3. Opening the Curtains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Laurie's POV is introduced and he thinks back to Jo's strange proposal.

Jo's POV being perhaps too reticent for sex, I had to naturally switch over to Laurie's. In any case, I do hope you enjoy reading from his vantage point. It was a challenge at first, to say the least!

Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 3  
Fandom: Little Women  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Amy, Fred, Cast  
Rating: R, Later NC-17

***

Mr. Theodore Laurence, twenty-five years of age and at the height of his masculine beauty, could have served as the model of a perfect gentleman as he serenely waited in front of his bedroom doors for a night he had been longing for for the last three years.

Not an inch did he twitch as he stayed in his vigilant pose, waiting for the bride he had just well to call out presently. His face pleasant and his posture ideal, he let his close-cropped curls press against the wallpaper of the hallway as he crossed one long leg over another and settled his elegant pianist hands upon his narrow knees. In the flame-licked glow of the candles surrounding him, his bare face looked almost ethereally detached with the world, as though he were more concerned with trying to figure out how many angels could dance on the head of the pin than whether or not he would ever be let into his wife's bed this evening.

Anyone spying on him at the moment might actually have been surprised by the peace and calm that seemed to be radiating from him-- doubly so if the hypothetical spectator knew that the bride Mr. Laurence was waiting for was one he had mooned over for nearly half a decade, one who had turned down his first proposal, and one whose very presence often made him felt torn between luminous joy and a rather mischievous curiosity about much he could tease her before she erupted magnificently.

Indeed, any hypothetical being who thought him perfectly unruffled by anticipation of what might or might not come about once he stepped through those doors was quite in the wrong. For although Mr. Theodore Laurence, known more casually as Laurie and even tenderly as Teddy, might _appear_ unruffled, he currently felt as though his stomach had been inverted so that it lay rather a ways away from him, possibly also being attacked by a legion of scimitar-wielding villains that his wife (his _wife_!) would have delighted in creating.

Never-mind his continental poise or his calm mien-- it was currently all that this scion of society could do now not to press his eager ear to the imposing doors separating him from his long-loved and hard-won bride, just to understand what on earth could be keeping her from allowing him to rush in presently.

Of course, he reminded himself, a wry smile settling on his previously unruffled features, it could be any number of things. His new wife could have been stricken by a mysterious case of amnesia that robbed her of any memory of the wedding that had been conducted merely three days ago, leaving her to wander off into the gardens attached to their little house to uncover clues about her mysterious identity. Alternately, she could have been abducted by a band of pirates in retaliation for some rather unflattering written portraits that she had finished the week before, necessitating her rescue by a husband who hoped she would reward him thereafter most dearly. Or-- and with a grin, Laurie had to admit that this was the likeliest the case-- his fair one could have fallen under the spell of yet another story and immediately began scribbling it to herself before she could lose the thread of it and deny the world something brilliant and possibly belligerent, as was her artistic duty.

Allowing his previously held posture of relaxation to slip into true ease for a minute, Laurie sighed in both contentment and exasperation, knowing that he would probably enter their bedroom for their connubial night after a half-hour of worry, only to find his new bride scribbling herself into an authorial frenzy. Instead of throwing themselves at each other with the mad elation he felt more than capable of every time he thought of her in his arms, he might well end up embracing a stack of tightly bound notebook sheets. For all he knew, their first true night as bride and groom might very well end with him helping her with the Latin conjugates of whatever stormy words ancient Christians might have tossed at their Roman lion-wranglers, or some other marvelously mad such thing.

But then, Laurie acknowledged with a slight twitch of his lips, such a possibility was a more than fair price to pay for falling in love with someone as resolutely her own woman as his Josephine insisted on being. No one who loved Mademoiselle March-- now Madame Josephine _Laurence_!-- could possibly do so without realizing how very prickly the thorns she kept about herself often were. But thankfully, Laurie also had more than his fair share of stubborn persistence, and even trying to anticipate the next unexpected curve his new wife might throw at him couldn't squelch his desire to join her in their first night of privacy together, after three years of waiting.

Three years of waiting. Three long, seemingly endless _years._ Even now, the thought of the time that had passed nearly stole his breath and made him reel at the thought of how much time had passed them since they had first parted and then reunited, due to nothing more than a gamble take on illness and chemistry. And even now-- after all that time had come and passed, after his heart had been wounded, scabbed over, broken and reborn-- Laurie found it hard to believe that so much time had passed between the moment that Jo had whispered her first no and the moment the moment he stood in at present, waiting to be admitted not merely as a lover but as a husband, invited to share whatever she would offer him.

Three years, and so much had changed-- so much he could scarcely believe his own stories as he had wandered through his memories.

[_Her hand trembling in the folds of her dress inside the cramped attic, her eyes glistening but her face calm as she had followed him upstairs after he had found her with Fred Vaughn, yielding to subtle courting._]

Three years, after all, in which he had wandered an ancient continent in search of a palliative to his now-wife's presence-- only to find nothing helping. Three years in which he had buried himself in a blur of loose blonds and ripe red-heads-- only to be lost in his own personal memories. Three years in which he had had taken every chance to dismiss the recollection of a woman who had rejected him first-- only to meet failure continually.

[_Her voice low and hesitant but unafraid in response to his furious questioning._]

Three full years of trying to deny himself of the echoes of Jo's luminous and painful memory, only to learn it would never be so easy.

[_"Tedd-- no. No, forgive me for using that old name. Theodore. Mr. Laurence. Please listen! What you saw back there was-- was not what you must have believe it was. You need not be so... so concerned for me._"]

Then two years of trying to force himself to forget her in the arms of so many others, only to find her face floating back to him every time he tipped toward ecstasy.

[_"Fred and I are friends, sir, and he was merely inviting me to Europe as his sister's companion and extending a favor indeed. So you needn't-- needn't feel as though you are protecting my virtue or maidenhood or God alone knows what else I could possibly harbor."_]

Then one year of pretending he cared less for her than for her own sister, only to end up nearly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

[The way she kept her voice so low, and her gaze averted from her face. _"I don't love him the way you love Amy, sir. And since I am sure he feels little but friendship for me, you needn't trouble yourself with a romance outside your own, whatever... brotherly passions might move you now."_]

Then two months of living next door to her again, trying to love her sister and ignore her very presence wherever it hovered, only to pretend that the hurt he sometimes saw flutter across her face meant nothing to him personally.

[_The blank mask across her features as she turned away from him, as though all emotions had been erased and replaced by dull sterility. "There are no other grand affairs but yours, sir. Nothing else worth recounting."_]

So many years, months, weeks, days and minutes of ignoring his own yearnings, setting aside his true feelings, hardening his heart to the curve of Jo's face and the light in her eyes, making even himself believe that she no longer meant anything--

[_His own voice, pained and harsh and low, coming forth to surprise them both. "Then you forget what I feel for you, Jo. It was love at first sight and love at last sight and love at the sight I have before me. Do you truly believe I did what I did because I thought you my_ sister? _Or of myself as your_ brother? _Even I could not be so perverse, despite what you do to me._"]

Three years, and and an aching amount of effort, and it was all undone within a quiet, chill, damp attic room, as her great, gray eyes had gazed at him with acceptance at his crude questions about other men, and her mouth had parted like petals against his insistent lips, and all the layers of fire that they had set down between each other had burned down to embers with shocking, terrible ease. Three years and he had needed nothing more than the feel of her hands and her breath to realize that his pretense at loving another had been nothing but a farce and a joke, a tease and a falter, a play enacted for the watching world to serve his own base needs.

[_Her face only half-believing, her eyes frightened but yearning. "And what-- what-- God, Teddy,_ you! _What do you still feel for me?"_]

Three years, and more than enough women, and her power over him was still as undiminished as ever. Three years, and with the maddening sheen of her lips as she pulled from him, the promise of a dull, respectable, societal redemption at the hands of her golden-haired sister flew away as though it had never been. Three years, and the past knew nothing of the present-- not when there was Jo with her ink-stained fingers and her heart-shaped face, with her luminous eyes and her heart-felt ways, her unknown heart and her unfolding desires, those wild thoughts that had haunted from adolescence and afterward, that always made him feel understood and loved and sane.

[_"You don't need to ask that question, Jo. You wouldn't be trembling so hard right now if you didn't realize the answer already."_]

Three years, and when her fingertips lined up with his after weeks of scorn and recrimination, he could finally understand why his own father had once left behind a fortune for his base Italian mother, fleeing all the world he had known in search of what was divine, beautiful, intangible and _real._

[_"There was never anyone else for me, Jo. There never has been and I doubt there ever will be. And you don't feel any differently, do you, Jo? You still don't feel anything for me?"_]

But she had-- she _had_\-- with all of her trembling in his arms high above the rest of the known world, her fingers entwined with his and his lips at her heels. And after he had whispered to her that he could not conceive of a world without her, her cheeks had been dry but trembling when she had told him to go to his sister with an offer, directly her principles like a partition that kept them out of reach.

[_She had told him: "I can't betray my sister like this."_

And he had looked at her with dark, frantic eyes and whispered: "You are going to be the death of me."]

When he had run after her days later, free of any ties that could keep them apart, she had turned to him in a far wood under a moody sky and told him without words that she would give him another chance to prove that he could court her, that he could love her, that he could be more than his grandfather's heir, or his past's leftovers, or his lack of a soul in need of the faceless, voiceless, gentlemanly redemption that had always been Amy's principle offer.

[_She had turned to him in that russet ravine and said: "I have no beauty to offer, sir, and you've shown your temper fierce. How, then, will I know that loving you is the right thing to do?"_

And he had looked at her with hope in his eyes at last and whispered: "Then I must prove to you that both you and I are worthy of what we want here."]

He had done that soon enough to the best of his ability. When he chased after Jo in the months after he had broken with Amy, he had done his best to be not just a better man but the best that he could conceive. For her, he had swallowed his pride and made his amends with Fred; for her, he had asked forgiveness from Amy and a way to repent for the ill-made proposal of yesteryear. For Jo, he had sat down to his piano once more and forced himself to remember the impulses he had sought to crush previously, to remember that he had something more to offer from his fingers than inscriptions on business ledgers and letters, than soulless words that meant less than nothing.

For Jo, he had opened himself up to hurt again; for Jo, he had persevered in loving another in spite of all the sieves and dents and cracks and bruises that had formed in him over the last three years. And to his astonishment, she had unfolded in the same way as well, despite the fact that she herself was no more eager to be wounded by unbuckling the emotional armor she kept between herself and the world, echoing his own retreat.

They were, the both of them, often too stubborn for their own good. They could be peas in the pod in terms of nursing old wounds and being completely undone by change, in their prickly refusal to open themselves up to any more pain than they absolutely needed to see. Even before they had met, they had endured enough of absent parents to learn about the cruel face of the world. But three years apart had also taught both a measure of hurt and grace, of how to forgive what needed to be forgiven and how to forget judiciously. They were, the both of them, children no longer, and even their arguments now had a quality of mercy that made them tread more carefully.

Time had taught them tenderness and their own foolishness brought them a measure of humility. And all of this had led him to what he had now: the privilege of waiting outside the room of the woman he loved, content to know that when he entered, he would be included into whatever madcap misadventure she had dreamed up, hands intertwined and voices low with laughter as they schemed and wheedled and made their way into the life together that they had struggled for constantly.

So though the same hypothetical stranger who could have been observing him earlier might have thought him mad for looking forward to whatever experiences the night might garner, Mr. Theodore Laurence found himself eagerly anticipating about whatever lay within his wife's bedroom and sharp mind currently.

After all, if there was one thing that a man could be sure of with Jo, it was that life without her would be neither boring nor easily explicable. Even three years apart from her couldn't erased that lesson from Laurie's mind-- _especially_ after that one beautiful summer evening when she had finally had it with his manifest insecurities and all but grabbed him by his lapels to tell him--

Quite self-consciously, Laurie found himself smiling and fingering the collar of his shirt. After all, whenever he had pictured time together with Jo, he had never imagined that their married life would begin with a bout of possibly criminal activity.

Although if nothing else, it ensured that the day that they had officially been engaged would be one to remember. What man could honestly forget a calm, beautiful, temperate summer day three months into a courting when the woman he had pined after for three straight years locked him in an attic with her, shoved the key in one of the many folds in her skirt, and primly informed him that no one would be leaving until this whole marriage _issue_ was completely resolved between them both, with no more ambiguities?

"I care for you very much, Teddy," she had started off that fine day, plunging forward into her speech while disregarding his surprised cry as so much tertiary sputtering. "And this is just _why_ I want to arrange our futures once and for all. If I have to live in suspense about whether you're going to marry me or run off with some other member of my family for even a moment longer, I may well burst into madness and 'accidentally' push you off a cliff and call on Amy, of all people, to help me hide what's left of the body."

Needless to say, this had been not the kind of talk that Theodore Laurence, twenty-five years of age and at the height of his considerable charm and grace, had expected to encounter as he had followed a flushed Mademoiselle March up the stairs into the very top of a house that everyone else had left discreetly. He had been more than prepared to converse about bodies but he had assumed that they would still be living ones and there would be no need to speak about their disposal at all, let alone get into the question of how various vengeful relatives might help with the entire deed.

But even as he had sputtered and turn all the various different shades of scarlet in the natural world, his Jo had taken charge of the affair in a way that suggested that she had inherited from her military father both dark hair and a zeal towards accomplishing the near impossible. During the course of what Laurie would later come to realize was very much a planned effort, she managed to devote a single hour to way-laying him in the field of love, smashing away all the rationalizations he always made about putting off the question of marriage for another day, candidly questioning him about what had made his resolve to marry Amy previously crumple and burn away... and finally, very gently, asking him if he still wanted the prize of her hand now that she was his for the offer.

He would always remember the calm, certain look that she had leveled at him as their hour together had wound down and she thought that this would be it, that he would leave her after this, that this was pain she might very well deserve to feel after what she had done to him three years earlier.

He would remember that look for the rest of his life, whenever he faltered again and was on the verge of letting himself fail. He would remember because now that he had her beside him, he could no longer afford to let himself slip to careless cruelty in such a way.

With compassion and tenderness in her eyes, she had held out her hand and unfolded his own within it, as though even his rejection could not make her hate him for the barest second, though he had raged at her for years upon expanding years She could have been his protector and elder as they stood there in that room, she accepting and he still paralyzed by what she thought was happening.

But then, out of the two of them, Jo had always been so much stronger. He should have trusted that were they ever to be in each other's shoes, she would be the only one of the two able to carry on with dignity.

"If you don't love me anymore," she had said, careful to keep her hurt from entering her words, "I understand why and how. I've never been easy to love and if after all this time, you realized that you... you simply loved a facsimile of a fairy tale me instead of the reality... Teddy, I wouldn't fault you any. If you won't speak those words because you feel as though you don't love me in that manner, then all you need to do is say so and we will be merely friends. Merely, but also every after. We can't doing this continually."

And it was then that he realized that though he had railed at Jo a thousand times in his past for being unable to free herself from her childhood, she had turned out to be braver than he in the face of overwhelming change.

Because he had been afraid. Even after these three months-- even after these three _years_\-- he had carried fear beneath his heart like a abscess hidden deep. Underneath the Florentine charm that he wielded like a suit of armor, he was nothing more than a weak-willed coward when it came to earning or losing Jo entirely. Because it was one thing to approach her when he had nothing of her to lose, nothing but chilly words and reproachful memories and meaningless pleasantries. But it was quite another to risk it all with a desperate gambit as long as he _had_ her, or at least enough of her to be happy-- had her hand in his palm and her eyes on his face, had her voices in his ears and her lips soft against his cheek.

It was easy to risk rejection when he had nothing left to lose. But now that he knew what he would have to gamble, he could not bring himself to speak.

He was a coward, an unambiguous coward, and with her, he always had been. But there was no anger in her eyes, none of the rage and desperation he had felt when she had felt once when she had turned away his ring. Instead, there was merely more of that compassion-- and eventually, more of that wisdom, lighting up the gray of her eyes, bringing the color to her cheeks, making her break into that one smile of hers that lit her up from within, like light filtering through summer leaves.

"Oh," she had simply said, when his fingers had tightened and intertwined with hers, when his lips remained mute but had brushed against the stray curls resting against her forehead, shoulder, cheek. He could not speak or whisper or do more than gesture, too afraid that the delicate balance that they had found between him poring out his affections and she tentatively accepting them would be ruptured entirely.

"Oh," she simply repeated again, and then somehow it was enough to turn her radiant face to his, her eyes suddenly filled with secrets and plots and a multitude of plans, as though she knew how to fix what she shouldn't even understand. Simply an _oh_, rapturous and solemn, and then: "Don't blame yourself, my boy. Given how noses can run faster than I have towards you in the past, I can see why you decided to clam up now. I've caused this problem of ours in the past so I may as well resolve it here."

And when she gracefully went down on one knee to propose, as any proper gentleman would to her lady, he had found himself nearly laughing at the ridiculous, wonderful spectacle she made through his surprised, and surprising, tears.

"Mr. Theodore Laurence," she announced, and her voice was strong and warm and steady, as though her words had been polished and made precious previously. "Let me end the chapter of our beginning without any more flim-flammery. You have largely been a trial and a nuisance since the day I met you, and you've made me cry half a dozen times and break more quills in anger than I wish to keep counting. I realize now that if we marry, we may very well become engulfed in a bitter battle to the death that will cease only when we have expired, presumably from mutual misery. You needle me like no other man, woman or child on earth possibly could and I have my less than completely lovable days as well, which you've already seen. And for all of that, you are also one of the kindest of people I have ever met and the very best friend I will ever have. I can't imagine a life without you by my side, strange and solemn and beautiful and abrupt as that life may prove to be. So if you don't mind a constant struggle by taking me into your life, I would ask you to consent to becoming my bride and making me yours for as long as we keep living."

He tried to speak and then had to try again, still tearing up as she kept her flushed face fixed on his, waiting for an answer tensely. And when he finally spoke, voice broken and low, he could have kicked himself for what he said so... _ineptly._

"Bride-groom," he managed to whisper. "You mean... my bride-_groom_, don't you?"

"Sorry?" she replied blankly, wobbling a little on one knee, her skirt not helping her in her endeavors. She couldn't have looked more surprised if he had whipped a flying fish from his trouser pocket and slapped her with it swiftly.

Clearing his voice he tried again, wondering if this was still a dream. "You should have said: 'will you consent to becoming my bride-_groom_.' Only women become brides per se, Jo. You can only have one bride at a wedding feast, remember?"

(Well, disregarding the example of Amy.)

Impossibly, she flushed even more as he had gone on with the most ridiculous answer to a much wanted marriage proposal ever, her literary pride apparently stinging. "I... oh, Christopher Columbus, I knew I should have prepared a speech for this meeting more carefully. I was reciting from an old play that I'd written that Professor Bhaer-- but never mind, don't worry about him, it doesn't matter at all. I'm just so embarrassed that I marred this even after days of practicing--"

Laurie hastily interrupted her before she could flagellate herself for the cardinal sin of not reciting her own dialog properly. "Oh, don't worry about it, Jo. It was a very lovely-- and deservingly _pointed_\-- speech that you just gave me. I could not think of one that would suit a poor fool like me with any more ease. It was... was very moving and very touching... and... and very much wanted. And accepted very happily."

She didn't seem to have heard him at first, still distracted by her failure as a writer and actress. "Yes but originally, it was delivered by a man to his childhood sweetheart who had rejected him once and came back to him after her heart had been broken by another. The intent is completely lost if something as silly as the bride-groom and bride comment is bungled up and the emotion simply gets lost when..."

And just as suddenly as she had began, she was taken aback, her eyes traveling from her twitching hands to his hopeful face, overlooking the slight sheen on his cheeks to gaze into his eyes wondering.

"And-- and accepted? _Accepted_? Teddy, if... if you mean...?"

He might not have be the exact picture of masculine authority and gentlemanly manners then but he did, he did, god yes, he had meant it all with every breath and ebb in his trembling body. And when he curved his unworthy hand about the glorious nimbus of her dark hair and assured him that he meant his shaky word, he asked her what else he could do for her.

He had no ring for her but he had his meager person, and if she had asked him to make it thunder for her, he would have reached his hands into the heavens and found a way to make them _sing._

But Jo had simply looked up at him with her shining gray eyes, his brilliant, brave, soon-to-be bride, the woman he would have waited for over and beyond a mere half a decade. "I think, after all this time and pain and ridiculous effort, there is only one thing worth doing. I love you, you sometimes ludicrously lovely fool, and I'd very much like you to shut us both up for a while and kiss me, kiss me, _kiss me_."

And in another moment, she was on her feet and in his arms and he did and he did and he did and he _did_, to the best of his ability.

That was Jo in a nutshell. As difficult to predict as a summer storm, but as madly delightful as being caught in a brief rain within the midst of a heat-spell from the bowels of Hades. And though the lady herself would probably raise a dark brow at his mixed metaphors and advise that he leave the fancy language to her, even she would eventually have to agree. She had a strength of mind that belied her thin, plain body, that could have shamed many a man-- including her new husband-- by her sheer stubborn persistence in doing what she believed needed to be done, contrary to their constricted society.

With Jo, there was no need to worry about whether they would or would not accomplish what was expected from them by others, not when she was near. With Jo, the normal conventions of high society seemed to melt away, replaced by the far better sense that he lived neither for his own pleasure or to please others but to discover the world he lived in fully. All the world seemed brighter and more open when he was with her, free from the constraints of his sordid past and tangled family ties, waiting to unfurl and rise and expand itself, pregnant with clean new possibilities.

Another woman might have fashioned him into a more virtuous and respectable man, true. But no one else could have made him happier or could have made him so glad to wake up in a world that could barely contain such a girl. No one else could have made his very senses feel alive from the weight of her gray eyes and the inquisitive warmth of her voice and the clear, sharp courage of her every nerve. With Jo, there would be compromising of integrity and truth merely to please the world's busybodies. And with her, there was no way of fully predicting what their days or nights together would hold, a state of mind that Laurie had yet to find less than extraordinarily thrilling.

All the hypothetical spectators and naysaying naggers of the world could go hang for all he cared currently. He didn't care if others might be shocked at the idea of him spending his wedding night playing pinochle with his bride, if that was as she pleased. If Jo wanted him tonight in both body and soul, he would be glad to live and die for her pleasure completely. And yet, if she chose otherwise, he would be happy to shelve his own desires for the moment and pretend the very hairs on his arms did not prickle in anticipation whenever she stood next to him, that only considerable will had kept him from knowing and adoring every single pore and freckle of her body already. He had waited three years, after all, and he could wait a time longer. No matter how... _interesting_ that wait might turn out to be.

After all, with Jo, it was always best to prepare for the strangest and then hold on for the time of one's life-- knowing all the while that no matter what happened, he would not change any of it in the least.

And when he finally heard her call out his name from the midst of her inner chambers, Mr. Theodore Laurence smiled himself back to a state of apparent calm, smoothed back his dark curls, straightened his slightly creased shirt, and stepped to the doors that would shield them both from the eyes of the outside world during their first true night as married beings.

There were no complete endings possible with Jo, only grand new beginnings. And he meant to make this one as happy as possible, no matter what else might happen tonight or tomorrow or during all the rest of their years.

***

**Author's Note**: Comments and constructive criticism is appreciated, as always.


	4. Rehearsing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Laurie finally enters his bedroom and finds his wife waiting.

This epic-of-a-wedding-night continues on! Here's to hoping my readers are enjoying the journey. ;)

Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 4  
Fandom: Little Women  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Amy, Fred, Cast  
Rating: Hard R This Chapter, Later NC-17  
Note: The long-promised sex finally rears its head in this chapter, albeit not all that explicitly as of yet. Beware delicate sensibilities!

***

After all the epic waiting and reminiscing he had just been doing outside of his wife's hallowed wooden doors, Mr. Theodore Laurence would not have been in the least surprised if the doors has refused to budge when he rose up to open them, the night finding yet another way to impede his entry. But thankfully, to his nervous surprise and very real delight, they swung their way open easily enough at his light touch, as though they had been waiting more for him than the other way around. And when he finally stepped forward to commence on with that grand new beginning he had promised himself earlier, it felt as though nothing in the world could at last get in the way of his delight at being with his wife presently.

Inside the bedroom, it was very cozy and bright, with more candles casting their faint coronas than had been featured in the hall he had paced previously. Golden light shone upon the fine wood of the doors and furniture and floors, and collected in pools and puddles along the fine upholstery he had imported from Europe to make Jo's contortions during writing as easy as could be. And in the middle of all the careful splendor, sitting quite serenely at the long chaise settee he had chosen specifically for her fits of being literary, was Jo-- her pilgrim hands folded in her lap, her eyes gazing down at her knees, her remarkable face reflected in the simple but grand mirror before her as though it were all the world wanted to see.

The woman before him, the one he had wanted for all his adult life, was not and never would be anything near a beauty. Nothing about her suggested feminine charm or dazzling grace, and Laurie would not have dreamed of disgracing her by telling her falsehoods about her figure or her face that her clear eyes would see through with ease. There was nothing about her long nose or hollow cheeks, about her gangly form or strong chin, that would drive sensitive poets in Europe to rhapsodize about her face, as had happened so often to Amy. There was no secret indentation of beauty to her, and no hidden cache of seductive clarity; nothing that might lead her to suddenly pull down her hair and be alight with loveliness any more than he could place himself in front of a manuscript and show off some previously unknown genius is his being.

She was simply his wife, vibrant and tenacious and integral and fierce, all the loveliness in her buried beneath her skull where so many overlooked it easily.

She simply was what she was, and if she asked now, Laurie would have told her that she was the finest creature on the face of the earth, and the only one he'd ever want completely.

But Jo had never asked and would never ask, would never want or need such assurances about conforming to the standards of fine society. So instead of launching into raptures about what the light did to her collarbones or the reflections of her avian eyes, Laurie simply leaned against the door, put his sauciest grin forward, and tried not to let the sudden pooling of desire between his stomach and his spine take over the evening.

"I'm not interrupting the start of a brilliant play that will take the country enough by storm soon, am I?" he finally asked when he could trust himself to speak, hoping his playfulness would temporarily mute his wish to kiss a path of fire from her collarbone down. "Because if I am, Jo, you are perfectly free to tell me off. I wouldn't keep any wife of mine from genius for all the riches in the world or all the jewels of Grand Pare'e."

For a moment, he almost thought she might not have heard him, that his voice had given his secret wishes away by coming forth as too harsh, too openly wanting. But after another pensive moment of reflection, Jo seemed to shake off whatever had been keeping her a thousand miles away from her physical form and looked up, the martial light in her eyes sending another exquisite shiver of tension snaking through his body.

"Actually," she replied, smiling sweetly, "I was wondering if my reflection here wanted to partake in some droll conversation... but I suppose that can be put off for another day. Since you're here, I may as well reconsider in the hopes that you'll be even more interesting."

Laurie had never known another woman that could start off a conversation with such tart sweetness; had never wanted to know, even. He trod a few careful steps toward her, as carefully as a man entering a lion's den... a metaphor not quite as outlandish as it might seem, given the gleam of those thrilling eyes as they met his in the mirror.

Although with a bit of luck, a fate far better than being mauled and eaten was awaiting for him in her arms now.

...Not that he'd mind just a _bit_ of mauling. Not from Jo, at least.

"Oh?" he answered, keeping his face composed as he wound his way to her slowly. "More interesting than a reflection, you say? Dear Jo, you may be overestimating me. What makes you think that in a moment, I won't be tongue-tied by your radiance or completely undone by the raptures inspired by your delicacy?"

She threw an arched eyebrow at him, and he wished he could place the tiny smile tugging at the corners of her mouth into his pocket and have it for keeps. "Besides my complete lack of either radiance _or_ delicacy?"

Most would have granted her the point but he wasn't about to concede yet. Instead, with a thoughtful look on his face, he pressed onward. "You're much too hard on yourself," he told her, still drawing near inch by inch, though he strove to look as though he cared not at all about being closer to her summer dark skin. "I'd say you are more than radiant just now-- more like completely _luminous._ No, no, even more than that... surely there's an even better word to describe you at present…?"

That tiny smile of hers was now threatening to blossom and spill all over her face, to transform it in that way he loved so much and once tried so hard so desperately. "I'd suggest lunacy but that word might suit you much better, my boy. Have you gotten into the laudanum again recently?"

"It was only that one time," he murmured, pouting winsomely at her, only a few steps away now, so close he could smell the delicate perfume she had doused herself with for tonight, a hide-and-seek smell of expensive violets that must have been a well meaning wedding present. "And how was I supposed to know about my... sensitivity before hand? I thought I was merely taking enough to care for a cold. I have no idea such an innocent spoonful could make me so… unseemly."

Jo straightened before the mirror and smiled coyly, in that way that merely meant more teasing torment from her end. "Oh, don't worry, my boy, no one's blaming you. Although I expect my father could have lived many more years in his long and adventurous life without walking in on you chasing me all about our house rooms whilst wielding a very pretty pinafore in the most alarming way possible."

He couldn't help his laugh when he finally reached her, one hand descending down to toy with her long, chestnut curls, his merry eyes meeting hers with the aid of the vanity mirror before them both. "Indeed! Though I now wonder if I should be insulted that he first thought my drug-addled self was attempting to get you to help me model the pinafore on my own, instead of on your beauteous body?"

Instead of protesting his lavish praise of her, Jo settled for looking terrifyingly thoughtful, thus frightening him even more. "Wait. _Was_ that truly the case? I really thought you had suddenly taken on another flight of fancy and wanted to play heroine in my recent story. Oh dear… no wonder my poor father spent the entire week after counseling on what to do should I find my garments stretched out in later years."

For a minute, his hands actually froze on her dark waves of hair, his horrified face only relenting when they met the laughing eyes set in her lilting reflection. "…Then no wonder he also kept trying to tug away all the ceremonial ribbons away from me when we were decorating from the wedding. I simply assumed at the time that he thought I had atrocious taste!"

"But you do," Jo pointed out, sensibly. "After all, you did choose me over Amy. Although personally, I wouldn't terribly mind some new-found predilection for pinafores on your part. It wouldn't do me any harm and in any case, it would make you all the more flexible when I need someone to read out a few lines from a play. Although I assume my father—and probably Marmee and Meg and John as well by now—may feel quite differently."

With a groan, Laurie sank down to kiss the soft mass of hair at the back of his wife's head, drowning his humiliation in the tide of her sudden, warm laughter. "You do my masculinity great injustice, my darling. And now I'm not sure I'll ever be able to see your family again without turning red in the face."

"I think you exaggerate a bit," Jo pointed out sensibly, one of her hands lifting up to pat his shoulder comfortably. "It's true that Amy will always rue the fact that she almost married you and Aunt March has sworn she will never again see you and my father thinks you may have a few… er… interesting habits in the bedroom…"

"Habit_s_?" Laurie muttered from his comfortable perch buried into her shoulder. "As in more than one? As in, at least _two_?!"

His wife coughed a bit, never a good sign. "You, ah, you shouldn't worry about that so very much, Teddy. We've finally married so there's not much he can say now about your purported predilection for women who cut a fine figure in pirate-themed pantaloons. I mean, as long as you keep said predilection confined to me, of course. He was already touchy over you, ehm, 'deserting' Amy. If he thought you were ready to do the same to me, war's end or no, he'd probably take his old bayonet and run you right through."

There was a long and terrible silence for a while, as Laurie's mind processed that image with regrettable detail.

"Jo," he finally said, in a tone of terrible and only half-feigned sadness, "when I am finally confined to a sanatorium because of you, my only satisfaction will be knowing that you will always be close at hand. Possibly in the very next room."

She had the gall— he was currently refusing to admit it charmed him completely—to throw her long neck back and laugh. "Oh, Teddy, you _are_ quite the romantic. European suites are not enough for us—we must have matching lunatic cells for two!"

Laurie laughed as well and then surfaced from the waterfall of her hair, his glittering eyes meeting her warm ones in the mirror once more. "When you put it like that, it doesn't seem so terrible a deal. And even if you do eventually drive me mad, they do say the lunatic and the lover are one and the same. So now I must ask: given your predilection for plays, which would you rather have me be tonight? I remain ever your humble servant, willing to do whatever it is that you'd like me to."

Laurie had thought it a simple enough question when rehearsing it in his head before time, a way to gently let Jo know that he would follow her lead for tonight and allow her to decide whether to pursue or leave off intimacy for now. But instead of bantering back with one of her fierce, funny jabs, he actually felt Jo startle beneath his tender hands and throat, like a bird that had suddenly had its comfortable perch yanked from below. It was enough to make him still as well, and when his eyes again met hers in her silvered mirror, there was something dark and uncertain lurking beneath her brow as she carefully made out her next words.

"I..." she began, and her brown throat had to work too long and hard before she could muster her answer and decide her course. "I mean... simply... honestly, Teddy, sometimes I don't even understand those slippery words of yours. Sometimes I wish I could take that tongue of yours and wring out all its secrets. What could you possibly mean? What shall I order you toward?"

It was enough to make him falter as well, the soothing words about relaxing and easing into their new privacy deserting him when her vaguely panicked eyes met his and made his ears begin to burn. "Ah, well, simply that... I mean, I wanted you to decide what we would do tonight since this is, after all, our first night in real privacy, and I know that you're, probably, not all that used to, perhaps being with, well, someone else in this... sort of situation... currently..."

It was enough to make Jo's summer tanned face turned a swift and merciless shade reminiscent of tomato paste, and enough to make Laurie curse the way he had fumbled the delicate situation so far. Jo usually took to change about as well as a nunnery took to a horde of marauding Vikings, and though she had permitted-- even encouraged!-- him to take certain liberties with her physical virtue in the past, she had been more than capable of pushing him away as well. And though their conversations could be nigh legendary is scope, neither of them had ever had the nerve to actually sit down and talk about their past lovers—or lack thereof – honestly. To be honest, Laurie did not even know if Jo was a virgin, or even if she _wanted_ to make love to him. It was all a tangle to understand how she felt about intimacy, given how she seemed to sometimes do her deliberate best to drive him mad with desire... and at other times, seemed gun-shy of the topic entirely.

At least for now, she was far more the latter than the former, the flush on her face spreading down the arc of her neck and the lines of her collar to grace the curved top of her-- God, that nightgown was so filmy in the light it was practically _indecent_, not that he minded greatly. It took an enormous exertion of willpower for Laurie to force himself to look away from the arresting sight before him and back to her face, especially when Jo began to speak once more, her voice strangely quivery. "Oh! You mean if... if we should... be as... husband and wife... should be... as indeed we are... currently..."

He would have teased her about the way her grasp of the English language has seemingly deserted her, only it was difficult to speak when his own paralyzing fear of somehow mucking up an otherwise splendid night had him by the throat swiftly. It was, in fact, a throat he had to clear several times so that he wouldn't squeak out his next few words like a half-grown boy who still hadn't figured out how to approach the fascinating girl who lived next door. "Well. Well, yes. But of course-- only if you should want to! After all, we could do... so much else. Like read aloud to one another. As married people so often do."

There was a long and terrible silence for quite a time afterward. And if Laurie could have, he would have stepped outside the scene just then and slapped his own self upside the head for sounding like such a perfect fool. It was lovely how he had made them go from being a freshly married couple in the first flush of their life into a pair married into their _dotage years_, waiting for death and whiling away the time by knitting, twitting and piously reading whatever religious books they could still view.

Given all that, he couldn't blame Jo for looking at him quite dubiously, although at least she did so through the mirror, which cut down on the hideous embarrassment he felt slightly. "...Really?" she inquired at last. "Read aloud to each other? Is... that quite the thing that young men in the private company of young women very often like to do?"

Knowing very well what young men in the private company of young women mostly liked to do, himself very much not presently excluded, Laurie proceeded to lie as convincingly as he could. "Yes. Of course! I know... many young married couples who proceed to do just that with each other in Europe. Especially when they... ah... wish to put each other... ehm... at ease... and chase away their first few hours of… er… doom and gloom…"

He didn't trust the slight, wicked smile that was beginning to steal over his wife's warm face. "I'm not judging, my boy. Because if that is..."

(Oh, he could not _believe_ she would stoop to teasing him at a time like this, when his blush was nearly as ferocious as hers. Jo truly never _did_ let up with the teasing.)

(Not that he'd ever want her to, really.)

She was actually smirking a little as she went on, though her face was still flushed enough so that she wouldn't meet his gaze. "If it is, I imagine I don't have nearly as much to worry about in terms of your past as I did previously. _Reading._ Hmmm..."

Laurie wasted another few minutes with more fiendish embarrassment, pathetically wondering how anyone in the Laurence bloodline had managed to run a successful business empire if they had a brain anywhere near his. In fact, he only put himself together when he saw her blush beginning to fade a bit and he found the courage to roguishly answer. " Oh, believe me, Jo, you've got plenty to worry about while trying to harness _me_ in the direction of general respectability. I wouldn't let those worries fade away quite so soon!"

That made the dying flush on her face rise again, although he suspected at least some of it stemmed from a source quite opposed to anger. After all, though her mouth remained prim as she made out her next few words, it threatened to break out in a smile periodically. "Oh, is _harnessing_ you now my primary occupation? I think I may have let myself in for far more trouble than any respectable woman ought to see."

And though he knew it was conceding their little game, he had to break the role to laugh and swoop down once more to kiss the part in her hair at her playful words, trying not to dizzy himself in the smell of her skin, sweet beyond the perfume fumes. She always tried so hard to forgive him, to smooth over the past that he wanted to forget and erase from her view.

His own words, when he could assemble them, were as light as he could manage. "Oh, probably. I hoped you enjoyed our complicated courtship, dear, because I shall only become a far more irritating presence in your life from here!"

Her words were nearly as dry as her gaze, as she pretended that she hadn't seen his slight, temporary break. "Oh, trust me. Women everywhere, married or otherwise, know that about men already. Why do you think I stayed a spinster so long?"

He gave her another winsome smile for playing along, with some roguish self-assurance added for taste. "Your tragic lack of one Theodore Laurence in your life?"

"I shall," she announced primly, "let you go on believing that if it helps you sleep at night easily. The things I do for you."

It was enough to make Laurie laugh once more, as much in relief as anything else, feeling something warm in him as he saw the genuine pleasure that flooded her face at his own soothed feeling. And as soon as he saw that she was more at ease than she had been previously, the flush dying down on her cheeks and her eyes meeting his once more, he finally lay down on the long settee beside her, their hands once again entwining.

Jo looked almost impossibly welcoming when he was this close, her skin looking as though it was lit from within, and her lips so tempting it was all he could do to keep himself from claiming them instantly. In her spotless white gown, smelling of ink and rare flowers, she could have been an wild angel, or a heathen priestess, or a supernatural parlor trick, though the reality of her made all those other possibilities pale and melt away. And when he spoke again, it was only after he had lifted one of her long, work-scuffed hands to his lips, savoring the sight of her gray eyes widening as he languidly kissed her writerly calluses.

"As long as I can go to bed next to you, dear Jo, even your flying nocturnal elbows would not disturb my nightly peace. And what do you mean about worrying about my past? I hope..."

He hadn't meant to sound self-conscious-- in fact, even as he tilted a charming smile at her, hoped ferociously so that that was not the case. But he couldn't quite help the neediness that found its way in regardless, even despite his continual efforts to stamp it out, to cut and burn it away from him, to disassociate entirely.

Jo didn't need to know this was him, or a part of him. She didn't need to see him as he was, rather than as he wanted to be.

He was going to be a better man for her. He had promised her that. In her eyes, the only eyes that mattered in the world, he couldn't afford to be weak.

So Laurie stumbled on, his charm clinging precariously, even as his words stuck to his throat as he muddled through linguistically. "I mean, I hope you do not feel as though I am somehow..."

Tainted. Or disgraced. Or simply disgusting. Not that he deserved to be known as any better, any more than he deserved the woman sitting next to him now, her eyes clear and her mind spotless, her hands clean of hurt brought to so many innocent others who had had the ill luck to stumble on him when he had done his best to commit social suicide slowly.

He didn't deserve her, or anything of her. And for all the reconciling that they had done, there was some small, terrible part of him that still feared that one day she would understand as much and walk away, knowing that the dictates of society would mean nothing when it came to her conscience and moral clarity.

She could still leave him for all that he'd done. And no reasonable person on the face of earth would blame her for it either.

However, those thoughts of his were swept away in another moment, as his Jo straightened once more in her seat and brought both of her small, firm hands up to cup his own, her eyes wide and honest as it took in his sudden flicker of fear. "No! No, no, and a thousand times no! You don't even have to fill in those blanks-- I can see them written all over your face. No, Teddy, I don't care in the least about what you did in Europe, or even who you did it with. I wouldn't care if you had-- had-- I don't know-- installed a harem on top of the Eiffel Tower--"

Somehow, he had just enough wit to interrupt her, although his voice was a bit shaky as he spoke. "Really?" he asked, only half in jest. "I knew you were open-minded but... Jo, darling, I had no idea it stretched so far." He managed a small, tight smile and even a bit of speculation, trying to drive the specter of fear away. "Harems, you say, as though we were in desert lands. Speaking of outrageous pantaloons..."

She made a frustrated noise at the back of her long throat, knowing him enough to know when he ran from something. "They would never find your body if you tried for one now, my boy. Fair warning. And in any case--"

She took a deep breath, as if to stabilize herself, as though to hold herself up to something. And then her rough little hands came up to cup his face within them, her thumbs stroking his cheeks, and her eyes straying so close to his that he could see every little freckle and speck of color that anchored them clearly.

"No," she told him, and her hands were loving and firm on his bare skin, her voice alone enough to hold him to her closely. "No, I don't care what you did or how often you did it or even who you did it with. That knowledge means nothing to me. In my humble opinion, we've both acted for a very long time like lunatic idiots, and we've let happiness slip through our hands often enough already. I don't care about your past-- I simply care about _you._ I want you. I _love_ you. And I don't care if you had mistresses from one end of the continent to the next while you were there. I don't want anything to come between us, ever again. So if you ever have the notion that I would think in the least poorly about you simply because of... of something you did in Europe when you were still running wild, I... I want you to stick it in the closest water-closet you can find because I. Simply. Do not. Care. About. Any. Such. Thing!"

If anyone would ever ask him every afterward why he loved her, he thought that this moment could serve as the perfect summary of who, what, when, and why he loved her. Why, with the best clarity.

After all, every time he felt he couldn't love her more, Jo had a way of surprising him all the more sincerely.

And after her hands had fallen from his face and her eyes had fallen from his gaze, he traced the outline of her lips with his own fingertips and thought of everything he had learned about her recently. He thought of their worst fights, and that fire that came alive in her whenever she thought of new creative insights, and the way his old lovers would scoff if they ever ran into her on the streets. He thought of how he had discovered her strange, whistling snore after two nights by her side, and her perpetual grouchiness before tea time occurred, how his curls always seemed to tangle up with hers when they got up in the morning. He thought of how she would look a sight on his arms in a ball, and scandalize their high-and-might neighbors in Manhattan when they called, and raise their children to be just as she was—as wild, as raucous, as free.

And he thought of how many people there were that didn't have what he had, and how he came so close to losing what he worked so hard for, and how lucky privileged he was to hold her now, over and above everything.

Laurie thought of all that and smiled and whispered, "I wasn't quite _that_ terrible, Jo. I think you're letting that fine imagination of yours run away with you. And also, strangely enough, with me."

"Oh?" she said, and her voice was soft enough to match his own, as soft as her hands as they settled on his collar and began to undo his tie slowly. "Well, I shall simply remind you, good sir, that since we have been wed and are soon to go to bed, I don't anticipate either of us soon doing much running."

Her voice almost trembled on the last word, just as her hands minutely trembled against his body as she helped him pull his jacket away from his arms, her fingers tracing the lines of his strong shoulders as she set him free. But when she gazed at him afterwards, her eyes were bright and fierce and as intent as they had ever been, something in them that he could not dismiss, or even want to unsee.

"So," he murmured, and his own voice trembled as his eager hands settled on her shoulders, drawing her forward steadily. "So I'm assuming you'd like to occupy the night with a pastime far removed from reading?"

"Oh," she answered, blinking for a minute before it gave way to that irrepressible Jo March grin he had been in love with for over half a dozen years. "Well, I really was tempted by that suggestion, Teddy, but I have to admit... I think I've figured out an even better way to occupy your lips. Would you like to learn about more about it?"

He very much did, helped with the impetus of her suddenly fierce grip on his collar, nape and neck. And when her face tilted to allow him easy access to her lips, suddenly nothing else in the night mattered in the least.

Laurie had promised himself as far as back as during their courting that should he ever be privileged to touch Jo intimately, he would be a gentleman above and beyond all other things. He would only caress her after she had given her consent many times over, and be as gentle and considerate and patient a lover as she could possibly receive. His promise had been made with the best of intentions, and even as he held her maddeningly warm form to him now, he had wanted to follow his rules completely. And perhaps he could have if their kiss had remained as sweet and languid and exploratory as it had been at first, when she had moaned into his mouth and pressed herself forward, letting him tangle his hands within her hair and murmur hasty reassurances against her trembling jaw, doing his best to be steady and slow despite the way she kept urging his hand to her impossibly soft breast, as though to feel her restless heart beating.

He tried to be good, he truly did. But then there had been her greedy hands exploring under his rapidly unbuttoning shirt, her fingers moving feverishly on his chest until he felt all his nerve dance under her peripheries--

And then there had been her full breast in his hand, her nipple grinding against his thumb as she pushed herself to him, her darkish aureole nearly visible under her sheer clothing--

And then there had been her own mouth against his neck, her sharp teeth scraping hard against the skin there, her tongue working against him in time to his own harsh groans and thundering heart-beats--

And then there had been her hips grinding against his, his desire rising inescapably against the warmth she seemed to deliberately set against his lap, her heated weight nearly enough to make him lose his senses completely--

And soon enough after that, there had been her high, fluttering cries echoing through the room as he pressed his hungry lips against the peaks of her barely covered cleavage, and his hands snaked underneath the infuriating long hem-line of a night-gown that was not nearly hiked up high enough for his comfort, his fingers wanting, seeking, _needing_\--

There had been all of that and soon enough, there was nothing in the world that was nearly as absorbing as what was underneath him now: the mingled brown and gold of her skin, the chestnut fan of loose, long hair, the snap of her teeth, the curl of her mouth, that little hollow of her throat that always seemed to flush when he pressed his face between her breasts and kissed ferociously--

Even if the world decided at this moment to burst into flames and burn to a cinder, he would have neglected it all for the feel of his skin upon hers as he sampled every region of her body by turn, as though to learn which part of her would shiver most intently at the touch of his tongue—what parts of her he could taunt with a touch and which needed real delicacy. After all, they had never had the chance to explore so much before, not ever, not even when they had escaped from her guardians' eyes for minutes and hours, mornings and evenings, whole summer days that would be spent loving and talking and touching. They had never enjoyed so much privacy or isolation, or had so little to fear from the outside world that often seemed willing to divide them completely.

And though some small voice in Laurie told him to go slowly in the midst of all this new freedom, to pace himself so as not to frighten her, he could not help the line of fire he kissed down her front, down her shuddering neck, down her full, warm breasts, down her boyish hips and her slender waist and the long line of her legs, cut off only by an increasingly useless gown and guided only by Jo's sighs and cries as she let him take from her a most indecent set of liberties.

He wanted her so badly he felt close to shattering, only a thin line of self-control keeping his lips from consuming her completely as they trailed down her half-bare thigh, his incisors grazing the pale skin there until she was bucking against teeth blindly, her hands on him nothing more than a blur of frenzied activity. He wanted her so badly he felt near insensible with longing, his hands holding her hips steady as he grazed her perilously close to her most intimate warmth, her little gasps and cries only making him tease her all the more intently. He wanted her so badly he could think of nothing but her pleasure, nothing but of their bodies together, nothing but weaving loose circles with his mouth around the very heart of her ardor, her last bit of beauty hidden from him by a trailing curtain of cotton that he ached to lift up.

Jo was wholly intoxicating in his arms, from the taste of her throat to the texture of her thigh, from the feel of her velvety breasts to the sounds of her sharp cries. She was both dream and fantasy, image and reality, and she made all of Laurie's fervid imaginings from years past look like the stuff of schoolboy idiocy. She was enough to make him almost glad that he had practiced enough with the women in Europe to escape humiliating himself against her already.

He would have done anything to please her as much as she did for him now, to bring her to the same heights of wanting, feeling-- _loving_.

And given all that, it came as quite a shock when he took a momentarily rest from loving his wife completely to see that, far from urging him on any longer, she now had her eyes shut tightly as she held on to the sides of the settee and seemed to be preparing herself for something vastly, _vastly_ terrifying.

***

**Author's Note** Heh. I don't think I've ever written a sex cliff-hanger before. That's certainly a new one for me. Promise you won't kill me for leaving you in suspense presently?

Comments are always appreciated!


	5. One Last Run Through

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Laurie attempts to understand why his wife finds him so terrifying.

Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 5  
Fandom: Little Women  
Characters/Pairings: Jo/Laurie, Amy, Fred, Cast  
Rating: Hard R this chapter, NC-17 later

***

There were (Laurie would reflect later) probably quite a few ways to react to the fact that your beloved new bride apparently found your attentions to her on your wedding night terrifying. A man might withdraw gracefully, for example, and gravely tell her that he would not dare dream of pressing her into anything that she felt unprepared for currently. He might gallantly carry on, finding some magic way to press himself to her that would presently make the terror leave her and fervent passion rush in to mark its place. Or-- if all else failed-- he could shriek like a frightened infant, duck his head, and crawl out of the room he shared with her, terrified himself of the thought that perhaps he had overestimated just how much she wanted _him_ in the first place.

Laurie had a little too much pride in himself to resort to option three and he knew he might very well end up a eunuch if he chose to be a demanding husband and go to option two. Therefore, he did his very best to execute option one, although his voice was still a trifle higher than he would have liked when he managed to follow through.

"Jo?" he asked, rather bewildered, a considerable amount of eye-brows askew over his startled face as he smoothed her nightgown over her exquisite thighs once more. "I... er... don't know quite how to put this but... ah... is something the matter?"

The last time Laurie recalled seeing her so horrified, her father had just burst in on them when her intended had been advancing on her with opium on his breath and a pinafore in his hands. But rather than acknowledge as much, he saw her-- eyes still tightly shut-- swallow hard and then jerk out a nod. "No, no, nothing's wrong! Please go on as you were before!"

It was just as well that she'd given up dreams of being an actress for ones of being a writer if this was the best she could presently do. "Jo," he simply replied, leveling a cocked eyebrow she could not see at her, "contrary to what you may believe, I'm not a _total_ idiot-- merely a temporary one. You may as well try and be honest with me now."

Her first response with a very high and enormously false laugh that ran right past being amused into being stricken with terror. "A ha ha ha, wrong? What could be wrong? There's nothing wrong at all! So please, just... you know. Do go on."

Given as how that last command was accompanied by a barely suppressed tremble of her shoulders, Laurie felt he couldn't quite trust it. So with a sigh, he finished smoothing her gown's skirt back over the lovely expanses of leg he'd found so much delight in and then got up to sit beside her on the settee. She wouldn't even look at him until he reached over and tousled her dark curls affectionately, and even then, Jo's dear face held rather more apprehension than he had ever wanted from her.

"Well," he began, trying to be gentle despite his own confusion, "You see... I'd really like to. I'd really like to a great _deal._"

He'd always liked it when he made Jo flush and now was no different, despite the... interesting circumstances they were in. And this was a nice one-- it went all down her beloved face to her bonny breasts, leaving a pretty red stain that he could nearly see through the thin fabric covering them.

(_God_ help him but he hoped they would resolve this issue of whatever made him a knee-knocking horror before he died of terminal frustration from wanting her.)

"Then you should!" she cried, not knowing how _much_ she was tempting him, her mouth wobbling into a smile that held just the tiniest sliver of delightful impertinence even now. "I'm inviting you to!"

"Like a city might invite a few natural disasters?" Laurie murmured.

Jo actually looked a little affronted by the comparison, her pride warring with her unknown fears and (at least for the moment) having won. "Oh, come on, that's going a bit far! I know I'm a little... green at this but you're no intruder into my, er, physical territory. You're a welcomed guest at Josephineland! If I were a town you'd just moved into, it'd be festooned with welcoming banners."

He had to work very hard not to think of the image of her festooned in nothing but a few paper banners that this particular phrase brought forward.

"I appreciate the verbal invitation," he returned briskly, blinking hard to dispel that last thought. "And as I said before, I'd like to. _Believe_ me, I'd very much like to. Only, it's a bit hard to feel amorous when you... er. Look as though you think I'm about to take a few bites out of you... and not in a mutually pleasurable manner either."

This made the blush fall from her sweet face, seeing as it now drained of blood dramatically. Still, good sport that she was, Jo tried to carry on, as though such an idea were normal. "Ah. Hah. Hah. Is that what you think? Silly boy! Biting, biting... I-- I love biting! If, er, if that's what you prefer! And also if that's what's... called for."

Laurie's shrewd eyes narrowed at her; he had the sudden feeling they were getting to the heart of the matter. "Only occasionally and never very deeply. And darling, you've still got a death-grip on the furniture."

This made her look down at her hands in horror, as though they had suddenly betrayed her. Still, her voice when she spoke hardly even squeaked. "Am I? Oh-- I am! But-- only because I'm very attached to it now! It was a lovely wedding present. You are the best husband I can imagine and I am-- looking forward to our wedding night very, very much!"

"Really?" he asked, and knew he was probably a terrible person for being very, _very_ amused in the midst of her mounting horror. "Then I am as well! Darling, it's been so long that I've nearly already forgotten what to do and where to do it. Have you've already got all the rope ready for us?"

Jo's eyes were the eyes of a woman who had woken up one day to find enough pigs flying through the air to festoon the trees with pork-chops. Still, being the brave wonder that she was, she simply gulped and raised her head gallantly forward.

"Not... so much," she admitted, her lips thin with courage. "But there's some ribbons in my vanity drawer if we need them. I'm assuming you'll tie me and then have your... your way with... me...?"

Wonderful. Now he had another tempting image to try and dispel so he didn't do something wild like actually tackle her before he could find out just what was wrong.

Instead of tackling her, he smiled instead, tousling her hair once again until she finally smiled weakly at him. "I was merely jesting about the rope, dear, although... Well, no, that's leave that alone for now. And Jo, if this is the best "I know what I'm doing" acting you can muster, I don't believe the thespians on the New York stage have much to be afraid of."

She smiled weakly again, although a certain hint of ruefulness now played on her lips. "Well, now you know why I wasn't such a hit in New York." And then, after he responded to that uncharacteristically sad tone with a sympathetic smile and a gentle hand caressing the pulse in her thin wrist, she sighed and finally came out with it. "I'm sorry, Teddy. I really am. I was trying to seem all-- all ready for this even though... well, maybe I wasn't because... anyhow. I'm sorry. I know you were looking forward to this so and now I've gone and been myself again and ruined it all."

"I'd dispute that," he said to her in her own defense, a mischievous smile playing on his lips. "I don't know about you but I think you're already given me a great _deal_ to think on."

Jo shot him a surprised look, which he cheerily shrugged off. And finally, after seeing that he was sure to keep mum for his thoughts on the moment, she sighed again and went on. "I was just... well. You know. Trying not to interfere with-- er. Whatever was supposed to be... presently going on. I know about as much about this as I know about being all nice and pretty and sweet and sensible. Even less, really, since at least I've seen others go about at the latter. In this area though... I've got even less an idea of what to do than a Neanderthal tasked with proper table manners. "

Oh.

_Oh._

Oh ho ho. He'd had a suspicion that this was what her uncharacteristic terror would boil down to, but it was good to have it confirmed.

And after a moment of looking down at her wincing face with tender affection, he reached out and tweaked her nose until she gave a sharp little cry and kicked his ankle in retaliation. Satisfied that said retaliation wasn't nearly as sharp as it could have been-- and that her self-disappointment was currently being thrown by her indignation-- he then cupped her warm face in his palms and angled his lips down to kiss her until she went back to being the Jo he knew and loved so well.

It was a good kiss-- as good as all their kisses were, as good as they all inevitably became when her soft little mouth opened up (in a way that was still tempting and still shocking) to let him ply her with his teeth and lips. It was a good kiss made even better by their isolation-- by the feel of her full breasts near bare against his chest and the way her own hands flashed out to grab him by his hip and hair, as though she wanted him close to her still despite all she felt yet. It was a good kiss-- hot, sweet, wet, _electric_, not even marred by the way her teeth sank into his lush lower lip in search of her own revenge.

It was a good kiss and he quite regretting pulling away from it, his lower lip smarting, his whole being suffused with a sense of rightness and completion.

The things he did for love, he sighed internally, and then ran a cocky hand through his cropped dark hair.

"I like you much better angry than frightened," he whispered, after he had finally pulled away and they were both breathing hard and her eyes were flashing up at him like angry, radiant, and indisputably beautiful stars. "The latter state didn't suit you in the least."

"Oh really?" she said sharply, although she couldn't quite hold her own smile back. "It's a good thing you told me. Otherwise I might have continued thinking facing a frightened wife would have pleased you immensely."

"I don't," he said, and had to fight the urge down to continue the kisses as he had done so before, down her collarbone and to her breast, where he wanted to make her dark little nipple as flushed and hard as it had been earlier, beneath his greedy palm and teeth. "I like you much more angry at me than looking at me as though I were set to painfully ravage you. Although..." And here his voice faltered a little, at the images, the inexperience, the _trust_ it called to his mind. "I suppose this means that you are not quite as experienced as I had... I mean, not to cast any aspersions on your virtue but..."

He had been a little afraid that she might hit him for assuming she'd be a little less afraid of intimacy because of previous romantic fumbling; instead, she simply looked down at her hands, her cheeks burning. "You can cast as many aspersions as you like, Teddy. I wouldn't live up to any, obviously. I mean-- not that I'd _want_ to, of course!"

(Although given the set of her lips and the way Jo had always despised appearing ignorant before him, he was tempted to wonder if she was revising a different opinion presently.)

But before she could start beating herself up as she was sometimes wont to, he diverted her with a hand to her waist and a roguish smile that sent another blush scurrying against her features. "Of course not. Why waste your time with other men when you had to know _I_ was still about? No wonder you wouldn't spend any time with them. At all. Obviously."

Another blush, indignant but also perhaps a little pleased, overtook her. "I knew nothing of the sort, Teddy. And really, I ought to scold you so for doubting my flawless moral character so much!"

"I can think of better ways of making me repent," he returned cheekily. "Physically even, if you know what I mean. And if you'd like to lay those hands on me to make me a saint once more, you may do so. I shall simply do my best to bear it manfully!"

Unfortunately, years and years of being exposed to his teasing had made her mindful of knowing when not to dance to his tune, lest her punishment to him soon become farce. So instead of wrestling with him as Laurie had hoped, she ended up barely touching him-- although he was half convinced that she did so only because she knew how much a sharp rap of her knuckles against his thigh would take his breath away now. And after it was over and he was blinking hard at her, the sudden, sharp pain/pleasure mingling with the maddening scent of her skin, she laughed, pulled away slightly, and tossed back her hair, near auburn in the candle-lights that still burned. "I hope that taught you well! And to be fair, Teddy, I think you've led a far wilder life than I have so far. But given that your charms far exceed mine, that doesn't surprise me."

He had to breathe very, very slowly through his nose for a few seconds before he could compose a bright and untroubled smile with which to greet her. Even so, he couldn't help the hoarseness that underlined his next few words. "I think you vastly underestimate yourself, Jo. In fact, I'd be surprised to learn that you somehow managed to make it to New York without finding yourself trailed by a passel of admirers."

He had worried of that often enough to upset the disposition of his own thoughts when he'd been in Europe. Hell, even as he'd cut a swath through the high society there, he'd still spent more time than he'd wanted to thinking about her and who would be privileged to share her company in another country. He knew she didn't come anywhere near the traditional definitions of beauty; nothing about Jo suggested the kind of milk-pail blandness that defined prettiness and purity for much of the people that surrounded them both. She had too much nose and chin and not enough eye and lip according to the standards of society, and while Laurie had long thought her quirks only made her more memorable and interesting, he was quite happy with the thought that perhaps no other man had ever gazed at her and realized what a wonder she was.

(Not that he'd ever tell her about this personal feeling. He rather liked his skull precisely where it was.)

"Although..." he added hopefully, his hand sneaking out from where it lay on the mark she had just given him to her own hand, "Perhaps I was wrong? After all, young men are idiots and too often rely on their eyes rather than their other and keener senses. Perhaps there was _no one_ who chased you about in windy Manhattan. Probably they were all too foolish to try to get into your literary skirts and find what sort of wild thoughts fly around beneath your dark curls and ruddy cheeks!"

She cocked a sardonic eyebrow at him; perhaps he hid less from her than he thought. "Weren't you the one telling me that I was underestimating my charms? Aren't _you_ the one doing that presently?"

"Er..." he began and then, cleverly, found a way to circumvent her great and terrible wrath, which he generally enjoyed but when directed solely at him. (Although that little rap on his thigh had been quite...) "I don't meant to underestimate _you_, dearest. Rather, I underestimate _them_! Stupid young men, with their stupid young eyes and their utterly insipid lack of interest in what ought to interest them. I suppose," he added hopefully, "that you didn't meet many of them anyhow? All your publishers and editors must have been older men. Usually very married older men. Worn before their years and with not much too offer such a talented young lady!"

"Well," she replied, smiling slightly in a way that he did not quite trust. "There were men like that, of course. But then, New York is so very _large_, Teddy. And I met my share of eligible young bachelors."

Thankfully, before his eyelids could start twitching unattractively, she smoothly went on. "Only they had a terrible habit of disavowing me for much better writers after they set themselves through my manuscripts and realized my plots were never up to par. Horrible editors, those young men. I hope you're much better, dear."

"I shall be," he promised gallantly, smiling properly now that he knew the threat was over. "And that's very good to know, Jo. Because if they were any better and-- worse yet-- even more amorous, there would have been a lot of dead bodies afterwards for me to dispose of. Would have made quite a mess on city streets."

She grinned at him in response-- sharp, bright, fierce, ferocious, the girl he had adored and the woman he now loved. But then, before he could go on by amusing her with detailed descriptions of his plans to dispose of all who had done her wrong, she smiled again in that shy, awkward way of his that could have broken his heart. "Although... to be honest, there was also... well. Somebody."

That old professor, he remembered Amy saying once, who had seemed to be courting her wild, bright, rash older sister. And given that Laurie himself had courted Jo's own flesh-and-blood, it was hardly fair of him to feel a flash of sharp pain at knowing what could have been, to hear of who he could have lost her to, to know his present happiness could have been washed away from him through a simple quirk of time and meeting and illness and art.

"There was someone," Jo was saying still, her voice a little tender after all this time. "Someone who was... kind to me, even in my darkest hours. Someone who was sweet and firm and loving and intelligent, who knew what I ought to writing and who was... was simply...."

German, Laurie distinctly remembered, and was suddenly seized with a sudden passionate hate for sausages and sauerkraut.

"...Brilliant," Jo concluded on a sigh Laurie could not like. "But he and I... we never really... well. We never even kissed, let alone came close, and I was probably deluding myself. I do that, don't I, rather a lot?"

Only the better angels in Laurie's nature forced him to tell her no and then led him to say, very softly, that it sounded as though she had cared very much for this man and if he were in the least bit sensible, he ought to have felt the very same for her.

It was a good thing to say. It was the _right_ thing to say, even as he had to fight back a sharp flash of panic to see the soft tenderness that still lit up Jo's great gray eyes at the thought. But in another moment, he got his reward for good behavior. And when Jo leaned forward to press her lips in a tender kiss, it was one for him and it was _his_, just as she was.

She leaned forward and he leaned as well, their lips meeting in a collision of sweetness and delicacy and under that, hot little coils of desire, drawing against his skin until he thought he could die of sheer wanting and pounce on her again. One of her hands found his curls again; one of his nestled deep into the fabric by her hip; their bodies languid but full of raw need as they pressed against each other once again. His fingers roamed down her body, stroking curl, crevice and curve with expert care, as though to make sure the bride he had wanted for so long was truly still with him. And his control only broke when she began making soft, impatient, powerless little noises and twisted her mouth against his once more until he could feel her very desire-- hidden only momentarily beneath her terror-- rise into his own skin.

He could feel it and he knew that this was his-- all _his_\-- her dark hair suddenly coiled tight against his fist, her mouth opening up under his greedy lips, her impossibly soft breasts pressing once more against his bare chest, the cleft between her thighs innocently firm against his own desires, one of her ankles hooking around his own as she meshed herself shyly but ardently against him in a way that only _felt_ premeditated.

This was his, all his. She had entrusted him with this. And now that he _had_ it-- had her with it-- he knew he couldn't bear to let it out of his arms again.

He was going to do something rash, he knew. Worse, he was going to press _her_ to do something she wasn't ready to if she didn't interrupt him. And though he knew-- of course he knew!-- that she could have no real idea precisely _how_ she was testing his self-control, he almost felt ready to snap if she wouldn't-- if she couldn't-- give him some clear signal that she didn't--

Her face was flushed with both love and embarrassment as she finally pushed him away, both their eyes shining, both their lips stung and red. It was nearly a wonder that she could speak afterward with such a swollen, kiss-flushed mouth, although as Laurie pressed his panting face to the back of the settee, he silently blessed her for it.

"I liked him," she said, her eyes intense and sincere on his. "I liked him quite a bit. But to be honest, even if I hadn't been wrong about what he might have wanted, it wouldn't have mattered, even in the slightest. There was never a point where I wanted anybody else the way I want you right now, Teddy. There's absolutely no room for comparison here."

It took a monumental act of will not to roll himself upon her and atop her and into her just then. But with every bit of will power still left to him, he angled his suddenly trembling hand to her hair and followed the line of a curl down to her flushed cheek and her full lips, her trembling chin and her shivering neck. His thumb pressed forward on the seam of her damp lips until she parted them for him and he felt the delicate flicker of her tongue against his jaded calluses.

"I want you so much," he said, his pianist hands running down her candle-lit beauty once more, as though she were another set of scales he needed to master before he could find peace of mind again. "I want you so much that if I were to consume all the world with you absent from it, I still wouldn't be sated. Do you feel anything like this for me, Jo? Do you feel what I feel knowing you'll be mine and mine alone? And knowing that I'm yours, because you've chosen me out of all the men you could have had?"

Pressed against the pillows, as he had pushed her backwards, she seemed impossibly delicate and precious and startlingly unprotected, although he knew from the gleam in her gray eyes that his fair opponent would not be so easily taken in. "I think you exaggerate, Teddy-- clearly under the influence of my potent feminine charms! I suppose you'll tell me now that you've felt like this for ages?"

He didn't know what he enjoyed most about being with her: fashioning ways to penetrate her armor or watching her do her best to patch it up. "Oh my but _yes_," he almost purred, leaning his body forward until he was almost draping over her, her ankle still hooked around his. "Don't you remember, Jo, of that one Christmas morning where your father came home-- and you, dear girl, became so overwrought I had to drag you to a nook in your house and doctor you with as much tenderness as I could handle in our half hour?"

She shivered slightly under him, though to be fair, it might just have been because of the way his hands now roamed across her chin and neck. "Oh Teddy, you didn't! That's-- that's so-- so very--"

Unfortunately, her command of adjectives seemed a little lost when faced with his fingers trailing lightly down her breast, coming to cup the sweet, full curve of it. Terror certainly wasn't part of whatever flickered past her face just then.

"Oh," he said lightly, still touching her so gently she had to arch her back into his hands to feel it, "I hate to admit it but I _did._ And the fantasies I had about being properly thanked for taking care of you in that little nook thereafter went quite a long way as compensation. It kept me virtuous through my college years, Jo, and that's nothing to shake your head at!"

She was shaking now, and not just with her head. "Theodore Laurence," she whispered instead, holding herself weakly up by her hands, "I ought to really upbraid you now for your conduct, do you know that?"

"Then why don't you?" he asked playfully, as playfully as he ran his fingers down her trembling form and circled the planes of her stomach with his calluses, until she gasped and arched to him. "I don't think I'd mind so _very_ much. Especially if you get creative with my penance."

"Thirty days of bread and water," she whispered, her eyes all irises as they fixed on him.

"I thought you'd be crueler," he said, grinning, one of his hands finding her ankles and securing both around his waist.

"It'd be hypocritical to be since... since I didn't exactly... well. I didn't exactly come away from that episode without some of my own... fantasies..."

Oh.

_Oh._

Oh ho ho. Clearly, all was _far_ from being hopeless here.

He had to clear his throat as he scooted a little closer to her, she now fully on her back with him hovering above her, her body already pressed intimately to his own as her legs opened up so he could occupy the space between them. "You're very good for a man's ego, my Jo. Although..." And here, he couldn't help suppress the mischief in his voice, or the chance to unburden at least a _few_ of the secrets of yesteryear. "I suppose it's interesting to know that both my conduct _and_ my imagination were far more scandalous than yours in recent years. Ah, the things I used to imagine about you when you were merely my dear friend Jo, walking in those filmy nightgowns of yours in front of your candled windows..."

This time, Jo _did_ hit him good and solid, although her loving little paw didn't make nearly the impact as it could have given her body _tightened_ next to his in her wrath, in a manner that only made the sting she left on his upper-arm ache pleasantly. "Teddy, you didn't!"

"I did," he answered cheekily, leaning down to kiss her good and proper so that she couldn't be tempted to hit him again. And only when he knew he had her under him, good and breathless, did he let go, the taste of her lips all but imprinted on his. "I very _often_ did. Every hour of the night that I could stay up for. Ol' Brooke should have stopped me but by then, he had other worries."

Jo looked both frightened and intrigued by the time his confession ended, although she still drew her chin up bravely to look at him. (She never turned back; it wasn't her way.) "Should I ask for any other perversions? Or have we finished up with them?"

"I think I'm done," Laurie announced thoughtfully. "I mean, unless you want me to run through the entire gamut of fantasies. Your attic features quite prominently, as well as all the interesting haberdashery you made me put on."

Despite herself, Jo laughed, and looked a little touched by his thoroughness. "Well, it may be insane and morally dubious in the most disreputable way but... honestly, Teddy, that's rather sweet. It's just that..." And how she could look worried when their bodies were all but melting into each other like bread slathered with hot butter he didn't know but Jo was managing it currently.

"I just," she finally whispered, eyes wide and tender on her flush face, "don't want to be a disappointment to you Teddy. I know you love me-- _of course_ I know you love me! You chose me when you could have had... well, probably a lot better than me. And-- don't interrupt dear, I'm speaking-- I know you love me and want me, mentally and physically. Only--"

Disregarding her instructions, he lightly raked his nails down her neck to emphasize the latter; she cried out sharply and then opened hazy eyes to look at him afterward. "I love you," he whispered, only his elbow and the arm that he had against the settee's back keeping him from descending fully to her. "And I want you in every way possible. Whatever else you believe, believe that with all your being."

"I don't think I have the choice to do otherwise," she said, her eyes dark even with the candle-light shining in them, and he knew that if he were to touch her intimately just now, he'd find her already damp and ready for him. "But I _also_ know that even if you find my figure-- which, by the way, looks like a wet noodle with a few uninspiring lumps attached-- insatiably attractive, it doesn't change a few key facts. After all, I know that... that..."

Blushing so hard he could feel it against his own body, Jo made a sort of snaking movement with her hand that resembled on a caterpillar on a conga line. Blinking hard, Laurie momentarily felt so confused it distracted him from his own passion-- a blessing in disguise, he was sure, but one he couldn't quite understand.

"Er," he finally said, once he felt quite sure it hadn't been a hallucination from him actually going _mad_ from wanting and desperation, "is that supposed to stand for, ehm, se--"

Panicked, Jo slapped her hand against his mouth before he could add the 'x' to the last word. "Please don't say it!" she begged. "Oh, I'd feel so wanton if you did!"

Given that their current position with him draped sans-shirt on her half-naked form, Laurie found it a rather curious request to make. Still, though his considerable eyebrows shot up at her words, he subsided it. "So... what shall we call it then?"

"_It_ will suffice," she mumbled, suddenly looking bashful, as though they hadn't been doing things that were a little unorthodox even for newly married couples. "Yes, even if you want me, even I'm not... inexperienced to know that... _it_ can be... disappointing. And that some men, for all that they're supposed to be beasts, don't like..." She made her ridiculous hand-movement again and it was a tribute to the gravity of the moment that he didn't laugh. "...With some women. And I don't want to be a disappointment to you. I'd do anything not to wound you. But I simply don't know enough to know how to avoid it. And I feel like a complete ignoramus when I know I should be thrilled with everything I presently have!"

Three ideas shot through Laurie's mind just then. The first was that he really oughtn't have given her that book on the six wives of Henry the VIII before. Clearly that had given her terrible ideas and may have made her believe that Anne of Cleaves' fate might well be hers, though he wasn't (thank God) nearly as big or obese as the king himself had been. In the future, Laurie would have to be far more circumspect about his presents.

The second was that this entire scenario could have been worse: she didn't seem at all afraid of him accidentally injuring _her_, which was what he had been most afraid of when he had run through the scenario in pleasant dreams before. Hopefully, it wouldn't be so terribly difficult to make Jo understand that if disappointment was to be found, it was probably-- sad though it was to admit-- only on her end at this point.

And finally, he had to wonder at his own perversity, in how even when she was being the strangest being that he could contemplate, he would love her all the more dearly. Clearly, there was something to that idea she had once floated past him, that he loved her at least partially because he had been exposed to her young and when she had been able to imprint him with her image before he had learned of just how much an oddity it truly was.

Not that it changed anything, of course. In all the world, if he had to choose, he'd have still chosen her.

Finally, after a moment of contemplation, he leaned down-- although he ignored her hopeful pucker to kiss her tenderly on her brow as though she were a child. When he looked at her again, it was with vast tenderness, with love and laughter dancing in him, temporarily subsuming his want. "Jo, dearest Jo. You are the very best creature I've stumbled across, did you know? You... of all the people to worry about, you should not worry about _me._ Or about..." He made her hand movement but added a little twist so that her caterpillar seemed to be jousting about a bit. She laughed softly beneath him and he smiled even as he felt his desire stir once more. "Or about _it_ either. It can be brutal and disappointing, Jo-- I won't lie to you about that presently. Think of all the pirates you've had maraud across your fair maidens in your adventures so far."

"And believe me," Jo said sadly. "I'm now regretting it."

He kissed her on her forehead again, laughing as she arched up to try and capture his lips, only to be eluded. "Do unto others, dearest. It'd be good for you to remember that. But even so, it doesn't necessarily have to be that way, Jo. It isn't always the stuff the nightmares. It can be intimate, dear. Sweet and gentle and loving and intimate. Even beautiful, if you're with someone you care for very, very deeply."

He made sure to linger on those last few words, as he let his elbow slide down and his grip on the settee's back relax so he could melt more easily into her, until the tip of their noses were pressed against each other's gently. This close, he could feel her blush as it pressed against his own cheek, her brilliant eyes coming to meet his own almost shyly. "Have you... ever found it to be that way for yourself?"

Well now. Talk about territory to tread cautiously. "A bit," he began, his voice a little wary. "Perhaps with a few women I admired, for a short time-- although next to you,they meant nothing. And now that I'm with you..."

He had meant his sweet words to be reassuring but rather than doing so, it seemed to unsettle Jo, and she began fidgeting under him until he had to retreat into a crouch over her, lest he embarrass himself against her completely. "Oh no!" she cried, not nearly as happily or wantonly as he would have liked. " I know you and I know what that means for you! Theodore Laurence, you've probably spent so much time dreaming about this moment that now that we're about to get to it, you're likely to be-- be disappointed or let down or embarrassed or-- or something--"

Dear God, she really _didn't_ know much about sex, did she? Although knowing his stubborn darling, she'd probably been too embarrassed and prideful to go to her sister Meg for help. She was impossible sometimes, honestly.

He made her pause with another light kiss and spoke before she could interrupt with mad talk presently. "Believe me, dear Jo. I've had experience and I know that men are fairly hard to disappoint in bed. Don't worry about me unduly. If anything--" And here he had to wince, even as he knew he spoke the truth. "--I'm more worried about _your_ disappointment."

Jo looked about as startled as he would have been had he pulled a mackerel out of his pocket and asked her to immediately make a meal with it. "Really? Why? What do you mean?"

He stared at her, suddenly unaccountably nervous. "You... truly don't know anything about the... erm... anatomical wrangling of the marital bed, do you?"

Nothing embarrassed Jo like ignorance, and though she had done it enough times that he had wondered if she'd forever be inured, she flushed again, all over her delightful little body. "No, not really."

It was times like these that made Laurie despair for the state of education in the States today. Surely it was better to allow young, soon-to-be-married women out in the world with _some_ education on these matters than to force young and confoundedly longing husbands to have to run through the whole of human anatomy on the eve of their wedding! He had known Jo would be nervous, and had assumed that it would be primarily because she would be placed in a situation that she had never experienced before, given the apparent stupidity of the menfolk in Manhattan. But to know that she truly knew _nothing_ about carnal congress and had been fumbling with him blindly all this time--

It angered up the blood and made him feel even more a knave than he had been previously.

Still, there was nothing to be done now but to do what should have been done earlier. And so, for her sake, he marshaled up his courage, boxed his embarrassment in enough mental concrete to make sure it would not escape just yet, and bent down to whisper a quick, highly edited and very metaphorical version of what she ought to expect to happen in the next few minutes-- hours-- _days_ now that he had her body presently panting beneath his.

He thought he had done quite a fine job himself, given that he had vast waves of ignorance to combat here. But just when he withdrew from her-- though alas, not in quite the way he wanted!-- and was ready to congratulate her on a job well done, he saw the look in her eyes.

The look, to be frank, of _profound_ ignorance.

...And cursed the American school system all over again, for failing him in his time of desperate need.

"Teddy," Jo said finally, "I don't know what a lady softness is. Are you referring to my elbow or my ear?"

All right. So this wasn't going to be easy. But. He could do this. He'd just... have to cut down on the metaphors and perhaps be a _little_ bit more blunt about a man's... instruments. He could carry this out presently. He _could_, if only for the sake of marital harmony!

So he bent back, tried again with all his heart and soul, withdrew from her in a wholly unsatisfying manner...

And then tried not to cry tears of bitter sadness when he was confronted with Jo's blank face once more.

"Er," she said, looking deeply regretful. "I'm very sorry, Teddy, but that... that doesn't sound very anatomically probable to me."

One more time. One more time. He could do this one more time. For her. For his love! Like a knight errant off to save a maiden, although more from her own ignorance than any other dragon that might be!

One more time. One _more_ time. And so, more intent on having a wayward pupil learn than ol' John Brooke had ever been, Laurie bent over to his task with feverish willingness...

...Only to see Jo almost _glare_ at him when he pulled away, looking deeply unimpressed by his love offering.

"Oh come on now, Teddy," she said flatly. "Aren't you taking this the least bit seriously? I am _this_ close to pleading a headache and retiring to bed if you're simply going to have your fun with me."

Ever the gentleman, Laurie did not howl. Laurie did not plead. Laurie did not haul himself off his radiant and brilliant bride to thump his head against the wall and wail aloud as to why fate wanted him to suffer so deeply and so dearly.

Instead, Laurie seized his wife by her shoulders and asked her, fervently: "Jo! I love you more than anything else in all the world! And so-- do you trust me?"

Looking a little worried for his mental health, she nodded cautiously. "I... yes, of course, Teddy! I'd trust you with my life if you needed to currently."

"Good," he said, with near military discipline, all traces of Lazy Laurence gone on a quest for his wife's satisfaction, as well as his own. "Because you must believe you when I tell you this. There is almost _nothing_ you could do-- short of running off with my gardener-- that could displease me this evening. Nothing, absolutely nothing! Sex-- I mean, _it_\-- it _is_ a little awkward at first and God knows, we're not always the more coordinated people in all of humanity. However, I have faith that during the course of tonight, just a little trust from you would bring _immense_ happiness to me. I want you so desperately it actually alarms me and every little move you make now feels like a bloody earthquake coursing through my body. I love you and I want to explore everything I can with you. I want to show you just how _much_ you mean to me here, with everything I have to offer. So... if you will allow me a little of your trust to show you what I can share with you here..."

She was still for an instant, auburn and alabaster in his arms, the girl he had loved for so long and the woman who had accepted him into her life finally. But after a moment of excruciating deliberation, she finally smiled and all the world smiled back at him in her arms-- a smile that his heart beat fast against his ribs and made his whole body pleasantly ache.

"Do you mean it?" she said, even as she shyly took his hand to place it once more upon her breast, where he could feel her unknown heart beginning to beat quickly. "You won't-- take this back, you promise? You're being true and honest to me here?""

"Don't doubt this," he whispered in response, and his hand curved tenderly against her breast as his attention to her form, only momentarily diverted, rose up again in every way imaginable. "I may be a fool at times but I've rarely, if ever, been a liar. I want this more than anything.

She looked up at him, eyes shining, her face a portrait he would carry with him as long as she lived presently. "Then I want this too!" she cried. "I want to explore this more with you. Only..." And here she surprised him by biting her lips and looking away, hesitant suddenly. "Only... perhaps we can make this a little easier for me by... compromising on something?"

"How, dear?" he asked, tender and low, feeling his stomach muscles clench up to hear that sweet, unfamiliar note of longing stem from her long throat. "I'll do anything for you, Jo. Anything you please."

She wouldn't quite look at him yet, which her impending this request all the more intriguing, especially as she cleared her throat and looked away once more before speaking. "Well, I-- I have to admit to being _speculative_, Teddy. You know how I can be! And even though this might not seem quite... proper, I have to admit to being curious about precisely what goes on when people finally get to... coupling. So I perhaps wanted to know if we could maybe... only put out the candles... eventually...?"

Oh.

_Oh._

Oh ho _ho._ And of all the _oh_'s he had to give this evening, this was by far the most pleasing.

He interrupted with an eagerness that would, in nearly any other circumstances, be very embarrassing. "Oh, but it is! Or at least, it can be! We're married now, blessed by man and God, and we've got dispensations to do near anything we please!"

The lights would stay on. Lord God, _yes._ He had known being with Jo would mean leaving behind all the tiresome conventions that had dragged him down so far but he had no idea that things would get _this_ interesting. He wasn't sure why his maker had blessed him so but he was going to be damn well grateful for it. He'd go to Church every Sunday, tithe at least some of his fortune away, and--

She interrupted him with a soft cry that ought to have warned him already. "I'm glad you approve!" she said. "I really like the idea as well! It's... you're beautiful, you know. Not that I'm with you merely because of your surface, of course. It's just... I've always liked the idea of... looking at you. Freely. And openly. And you seem so enthusiastic that I thought that maybe you wouldn't mind if I were just a little bit outlandish and..."

The pretty flush that had been playing on her face and collarbone seemed to deepen almost impossibly, until she was all but a scarlet flower of a woman splayed out enticingly beneath him. Laurie had to exercise rather more control than he'd be comfortable speaking of not to get on with exercising her trust already. "Yes, dear," he smoothly said instead, trying not to picture her writhing under him just yet and spoil the fun prematurely. "I understand your request! And believe me, I'd be happy to carry it out. After all..."

And though it likely wasn't playing fair, he couldn't quite help drawing the hand that had been demurely resting against her breast to just below the smooth, supple mound of it, to cup the tempting curve of it easily.

After all, she'd spent whole _years_ tempting his self-control. Wasn't it fair to return the favor a little here?

"I live and die for your pleasure tonight," he whispered. "Make any request you please right now. I'll fulfill it gladly."

"That's good to know," Jo croaked in a shy little voice that made him grin like a cat that had caught the prized canary at last, and that sent the hand not occupied by her to undo his trouser buttons quickly. "I'm g-gratified to know you've pay so much attention to me..."

"Mmm hmm," he agreed, dexterous pianist hands already toying with one of her dark little nipples as they unbuttoned his slacks slowly. "Oh yes. A Laurence man always aims to please."

"I can see the truth of that right now," Jo weakly agreed, her legs tightening a little on his boyish hips. "Only--"

Only? _Only?_ Only what? Laurie and his busy, busy hands didn't like the sound of that in the least.

"Only--" she said again, stubborn as always, doomed to make him worry perpetually. "Only, I'm not sure if I want you to see me fully... free. Or at least... maybe not just yet! Maybe in a little bit, after we've come to... feel ourselves already? So maybe... possibly... if you don't mind...?"

Oh.

_Oh._

Oh dear.

Suddenly, Laurie experienced a rather sinking feeling.

"Perhaps," she asked finally, touching hope in her eyes even as she moved like sin under him, "you wouldn't mind wearing a blindfold for me?"

***

**Author's Note**: Somehow, I manage to end this with yet another sex-cliffhanger. I really wouldn't be surprised if everyone who finished this chapter wanted to kill me currently! However, never fear. The next chapter still be the last, absolutely.


	6. Completion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Theodore and Jo Laurence consummate their marriage fully.

The end of the series, and the start of a new marriage. I hope you do enjoy this part-- it was hell to write but worth the effort, hopefully!

Title: A Night To Remember, Chapter 6  
Fandom: Little Women  
Rating: NC-17 for this final chapter

**Important Note**: This is the NC-17 rated version of the story. If you'd rather skip over the explicit sex to linger on the emotional convulsions, you can read the R-rated version archived at fanfiction.net.

***

Given the unorthodox love life Laurie had experienced over the last few years, he considered himself unusually well-versed in accommodating to eccentric boudoir conditions.

It was a condition that went hand in hand, of course, with keeping company with equally eccentric women. Even a cursory flash back to his wilder days brought many of them at hand. There had been, for example, Louisa in London, a courtesan for some reason insisted he keep a bowler hat on whenever he reached out for her body. There had been the equally fair and strange Giselle in Italy, and she had been even stranger in her lust for tying him into knots that often left his feet and fingers tingling for hours after he had left her candle-lit beauty. And finally, and possibly most wickedly, there had been the rather daunting Clara in Germany. She had enjoyed practicing the English vice very often, which he would have been perfectly fine with if only _she_ hadn't like to wield a paddle on _him_ most... vigorously.

(Laurie sometimes had to wonder if exposure to Jo at an early age had left him with a life long yearning for women who tested his limits to the honest point of insanity.)

Leave it to Jo, though, to find a way to shock a man long thought utterly unflappable where the ladies were concerned.

"A blindfold?" he asked, incredulous not only because of the request but also because of the person making it. "As in... a fold made to blind? As in, something covering my eyes so I won't have the distinct pleasure to looking at you presently?"

"Ah," Jo said, looking uncharacteristically meek. "Er... yes? If you don't mind, Teddy?"

The problem was that he rather did. Years of trying to banish the specter of Jo from his mind and his heart had made him very adamant about chasing only women who were her diametric opposite in appearance-- small where she was tall, red or blond when she was dark, curvy where she was blade-thin-- and even more adamant about keeping the lights on when he made love. It had been the only way to hold his oldest and once-cruelest friend at bay from his thoughts... which was why the thought of actually making love to _Jo_ in the dark felt so bittersweet.

He wanted so much to look on her face as she experienced love for the first time that it took his breath away, as though it were _he_ who was being introduced to carnal matters here.

But after a moment, Laurie shook his habitual selfishness off and resigned himself to what was coming. After all, this was her very first time, she barely knew what intimate relations entailed, and she was doing her best to be comfortable in a situation that probably made her want to jump half off her skin. He had to be willing to do whatever he had to to make her comfortable and pleased.

...And if the full truth had to be told, he had to admit that he rather liked the glint in Jo's eyes as she made her request, one that hinted that his blindfold might serve purposes other than shielding her modesty.

Which was he nodded again and smiled at his bride, brightly and sincerely. "Fine then," he told her, and pressed a light kiss against her brow that made her smile tentatively. "Whatever you want, Jo, is whatever I'll do. So hand me my tie now, please."

A few minutes and a bit of help from Jo later, the sturdy fabric was fastened upon his eyes and wrapped around the back of his head, blocking his gaze completely. It felt awkward and foolish and Laurie hoped it would be inclined to eventually slip, but for now, it covered him fully. So with a sigh, he let his hands fall down, smiled reassuringly at where he supposed Jo still was, stood up carefully, pushed his trousers and drawers down past his hips and to his feet...

And stopped as soon as Jo made a noise that made her sound like an asthmatic bear coming out from its slumber half-way through a strangling.

"What is it?" Laurie cried out loud, trying not to panic while also attempting to understand what in the world might be prompting that noise. "What's gone wrong?"

Jo made that asthmatic bear noise of hers again, before finally speaking again, though her words came out a little garbled and weak. "It's... oh, Teddy, nothing's wrong! It's just that I'm... well... I got a bit startled by... well... I mean... is that _supposed_ to look so... angry?"

Forgetting he couldn't see anything, Laurie looked down, and then frowned when he remembered his blindfold. "Angry? I'm not angry. Who's angry now?"

"It's not really a _who_," Jo replied, and he had a feeling that if he could see her, she'd be furiously blushing. "It's more like a... what. And, well, I knew men probably had larger versions of what little Demi has but I didn't know they could come along looking so..."

...Oh?

Oh.

_Oh!_

Oh, he probably should have anticipated this response from her now.

"It's not angry," Laurie said, trying for 'manly' and 'reassuring,' though he was afraid he might start laughing after he realized her reason for being flustered. "It merely _looks_ agitated. I assure you, it-- and I-- are actually feeling quite chipper indeed."

"...That's good to know," Jo murmured, after an awkward silence where Laurie stood before her, nearly stark naked, feeling very foolish with his legs still tangled up with the remains of his clothing. "I'm... grateful about that, really. It's just that it's so... so..." And here, Jo's voice pitched so low Laurie had to lean forward to hear, although at least it let him step out of his pants and feel a little less like a dolt.

"So _intimidating_," Jo finally said, in a mortified squeak, while her new husband tried very hard not to preen, wondering if he ought to let her know he was really only average, and then decided to say nothing. "Is that... I mean... I think I'm starting to understand that awful metaphor of yours about the 'lock and the key' now and... well..."

"Do go on," Laurie solicitously said, as he gingerly groped his way back to his seat on the settee his bride still lay sprawled on, lightly moving one of his hands up to touch an unknown patch of bare, hot skin. "Let Professor Teddy come up with answers to all the questions you may have at present."

Jo made a noise that sounded like a cross between a laugh and a sigh, before one of her own hands came down to rest on his and lead them up to her breast. He caressed the even softer skin there and she sighed again, more languidly this time, a simple little hum that somehow was enough to send prickles of heat up and down the lines of his body.

"That's supposed to fit inside me, isn't it?" she asked, and though her voice held tremors of fear, her hand still held his to her form. "I think I'm finally starting to understand a bit about those ludicrous and unnecessarily convoluted explanations you were trying to feed me."

"They were the best I could do on such short notice," he told her lightly, although he felt again all his old worries about the night returning. "Next time, I'll commission pictorial depictions to educate you more thoroughly." Then, more seriously, he went on. "And I'll be as gentle as I can, Jo, and stop any time you want. If you feel in the least uncomfortable, I swear, all you'll have to do is shout and I'll end it as quickly as--"

But before he could start sputtering out contingency plans, her clever hands had somehow found his broad shoulders and his sleek hair and were pulling him down to him again, until he tipped his neck and his lips met hers, slow and hot, electric and languid, raw and open and aching with need. And when he finally pulled back, the heat of her searing his skin, he knew from the curve of her lips against his shuddering throat that she was already smiling.

"If I want you to stop, you'll stop," Jo said, and she sounded blessedly like herself again, brave beyond anything. "But right now, I want you to _start_ because _I_ want to. So how do I get you to begin already?"

And when Laurie finally slid his hands onto Jo's dress and across her river of smooth curls and skin, she received her answer with her laughter flush against his neck.

***

He began by kissing her ear, his lips deliberate and languid as it wove across her body. He had actually meant to reach her mouth again but, circumstances being what they were, his eyesight was not what it could be and when she threw her head back at the feel of his fingers on her collar, his teeth found themselves at the lobe of her ear. It didn't stop him though, not for a minute, and he simply carried on as she shivered underneath him, her fingers tangling in his curls and his own running up and down her form, ready to unravel all her secrets.

That turned out to be a more difficult task than he had initially anticipated. For whatever reason, whoever had made Jo's nightgown had done so by scattering what felt like hundreds of buttons down the white front, scattered like stars across the night's velvet canopy. Normally, Laurie might have found the effect of it alluring as he undid them one by one 'til he had Jo bare beneath him, nude and flushed and silky and dissatisfied and aching for everything he could currently. But unfortunately for him, although Jo felt flushed and dissatisfied and silky indeed, having her bare beneath him proved far more difficult a proposition than it should have been, given the way his shuttered eyes led his fingers fumbling over her gown's intricate openings. And after a few minutes of failing to reach the least bit of bare chest, even feeling Jo's perfect breasts rise and fall under his hands while she laughed at his hopeless efforts proved remarkably annoying.

"Give up?" Jo playfully asked after the eighth fruitless swipe he took at her buttons resulted in nothing more than another growl rising in his throat. "All you need to do is swallow your pride and ask for my help, Teddy. I swear, if I knew how entertaining you were when blind, I would have asked you to wear a blindfold through all the hours of our courting!"

"That would have made for an even more interesting experience than the one we've already shared," he agreed, although his lips were already drawing up into a rather wolfish smile as he realized a way around his lack of sight. "And, oh, Jo..."

Her breasts suddenly stilled beneath his fingers and Laurie grinned even more widely.

"Do you happen to have a very great attachment to this gown?"

Then, before his lovely bride could quite finish assuring him that she could just undo the damned thing herself, he leaned down, took one of her buttons between his teeth--

And discovered a completely different way of helping her disrobe.

"Or we could do that," he said and, after another moment went by and he realized she was going to let him keep his life, smiled charmingly. "That's one way of getting around my current blinding."

"I suppose I can't fault your attempts at problem solving," Jo finally said, after a long moment of hissing at him and sounding torn between amusement and consternation. "Although I'll let _you_ explain to Meg what happened to her present from the wedding! I hope you enjoy tonight because I'm not sure you'll even remain _alive_ after she gets her hands on you."

Laurie would have told her that this night was worth it but his mouth soon became otherwise occupied...

And once Jo sent her nails to run down his neck as he helped her undress, he could tell she wasn't all that put out either.

Undressing Jo still ended up taking more time than he wanted, even after she gave in and helped him so he wouldn't _actually_ tear all of those irritating little buttons off completely. He still ended up giving it a good go, however, and somehow-- between his ready teeth and her flustered and oft-nipped hands-- they managed to pull all the fabric from her torso, until a rather delicious arc of skin ended up splayed beneath him from her belly button to her chin, the warmth of it taunting him as he felt it just underneath.

Laurie groaned, Jo giggled, and even without the help of sight, he knew just how fiercely she was grinning.

"Didn't you know," she whispered, "what you were going to do with me once you finally had me pinned down?"

"Of course not," Laurie lied very sweetly. "But I don't mind improvising an answer."

Then his greedy lips moved and found themselves pressed against her velvety aureole, and all conversation momentarily ceased.

He had dreamed of this night together before, probably a hundred thousand times before, in a million different configurations as pale and dark hours had slid him by in wicked dreams. He had dreamed of it as a boy, and denied it as a man, and had felt his inner heart shudder against his palm as he had made silent love to her in his bed, even when she had been gone from him for years. He had dreamed, and wondered, and imagined, and hoped, and now that she was here, now that she was actually near...

Well, here she was and here _he_ was, loving and blind and hungry. Here they were, and though he could not see, he kissed her as though his lips and his eyes held their own strange sight, as he ran his tongue and fingers all over every crevice he could find of her, as though mapping out every pore and follicle of her body. Here she was and here _he_ was, kissing every bit of her could reach, from the tender aureoles of her breasts to the tendons of her neck to the curve of her belly as it rippled with every shaky breath she expelled. He kissed the tip of her nose, the edge of her collar, the jut of her shoulder and the valley between her breasts, kissing even as he felt the heat build up between them. He kissed her until she moaned and let her own hands fall frantically on his frame, as though she could something flame inside her as well, as though she could feel the same salt-slicked need he felt from root to tip, as her hips moved against his with surprising eagerness.

He felt hungry, needy, blind and so, so damn _alive_, as though he were finally being revived after months and months of walking about half-asleep. And by the time he had finished making her sob by taking her dark little nipples between the points of his teeth, he found himself slicking his fingers between his wife's thighs and realizing that if he could not relieve himself of some of the pressure building in him, he might very well die of longing.

"What do you want?" he asked, and shifted so that his erection nestled in the delicate crease left her thigh and her mound, the friction there sending him groaning. "Jo, what is it that you want? What is it that you _need_? Tell me and I'll give it-- I swear, I'll give _you_\--"

And he would finish his sentence but for her whimper, and suddenly it was all he could do not to press himself to her until he was fully spent, the pressure in him building, and building, and _building._

Jo cried out again, one a low desperate sound, one that made fire erupt between his spine and his knees. And when she finally whispered back, her voice was throaty and helpless, so low with begging that he almost-- he nearly couldn't--

Oh, this was most certainly not helping him keep resolute and gentlemanly.

"T-touch me," she whispered, and her mouth was moving against his own as she spoke, as she hesitantly led one of his hands between her legs to the animal beat of her heart. "Please, Teddy, do anything, _please_, just-- j-just--"

Her hips shifted again and if he had not had such fine control over himself again, he would have made her his, right then and there, all sense of consideration lost entirely.

Instead, with the shreds of control left to him, he only allowed the head of his prick to slide against her inner warmth, against the folds of velvet between her legs, against that part of her that made his knees buckle hard--

But only to slide for a few precious seconds before he could move away, panting desperately, dipping down to kiss her neck and her breasts, almost tearing her gown away to have access to more of her body.

Her heart beat like that of a frantic bird's as his teeth grazed her tender nipple frantically and she whispered: "More," and then, even more dangerously, "Teddy, _please_\--"

And Laurie had always happy to oblige her but never before, he realized when he dipped his hand against the delicate heat just below her hips, had he complied with a request more enthusiastically.

And so help him, when she cried out and opened her thighs to his inquisitive fingers, she was so warm, and so wet, and so willing and so...

So _vulnerable_ already.

He could never be described as inexperienced in the pleasures of the bedroom, not after his adventures in Europe, not after he had tried so hard to forget her. And yet, as Laurie found himself stroking blindly and tenderly between her legs-- his sensitive finger-tips gliding up and down the softness of her folds, caressing the rough curls between her legs only to open her up again-- he felt as though he had somehow stumbled into the past again. Somehow, she made him feel reduced to that naive young man who set out from America years ago, not knowing what to do when he touched his first bare-legged woman but only knowing he did not want to fail again, that he did not want to be rejected entirely.

Only Jo could have done this to him. Inexperienced, ignorant, wholly innocent-- but still Jo, still the woman he loved, still the only one in the world who could surprise him over and over--

Beneath his lips, her heart beat; beneath his fingers, she pulsed ceaselessly. And every time he ran his thumb against the pearl of her pleasure between her velvety folds, she whispered his name, calling him to her over and over, her hands running up and down the length of his spine, raking claws over and above his throat, her nails sinking in deep.

"Teddy," she whimpered, her voice cracking on her own cry, and he wondered what she felt and what she saw as he stretched over her, blind and naked and with his hands never-ending within her inner warmth and on her belly. He wondered what he saw even as he never ceased to touch her even for a moment, determined to bring her to that place beyond words, to please her in a way that no other man would ever get to do, or touch, or see.

This was his, all his, and he'd be damned if he ever shared this with anybody.

But even as his fingers moved, he could feel his own ache begin, the frustrations of his own body starting to cloud his mind, especially after all the interruptions it had suffered from already.

And he didn't want to interrupt her pleasures, not when she was whimpering his name, not when her nails were clawing at his back again, not when she was shifting her hips and bucking every second his fingers continued to work against her skin...

He didn't want to interrupt her in any way whatsoever... but if he didn't do something to take care of himself, he thought he might very well embarrass himself without even experiencing it with a certain amount of pleasure. And he certainly didn't want to end tonight with himself spilling fruitlessly on her knees, of all things.

Maybe it would be all right to be selfish for a moment if he attended to her quickly afterward.

At this point, he'd be more than willing to beg for forgiveness on his knees.

"Will you do something for me?" he asked, when his plan finalized in his mind, and felt his heart pound as she reared up in surprise, after one of his fingers proved bold enough to begin easing its way inside her already. She was ridged deep within, intimate and real and deliciously _untouched_, and so damn taut he knew he could not simply take her as he pleased. But oh God, he needed and he wanted and he might end up expiring of longing if he _didn't_\--

Well, selflessness had never been a cardinal virtue of his. But as he clasped her hand to his and hear her shakily whisper her assent, Laurie found he could no longer give a damn about that either.

He wished he could see her just then, that his wretched blindfold would not keep so persistently to him, that he could see what she looked like as she stretched open for him, her thighs going wide and her eyes probably going even wider as he led her hands to a place within her he knew she had never before reached. He imagined her wild and dark eyed for him, even as she grew so wet on her inner ridges that his palm went tacky with it, so wet she sent him aching.

And when he led her unsteady fingers first to her warmth and then to his prick, all he could do was shudder and hold on as she embraced him slowly.

His fingers replaced hers and he could feel her shiver again, the smell of her tangible on them both, animal-hot and touched with something faintly salty.

"Trust me," he whispers, and the fingers of his left hand begin to stroke her folds at the same time the fingers of his right clasped her palm around his erection desperately. "Trust me, Jo, please, love, trust me, trust me, _trust me_\--"

And he would say more but then Jo yanked him hair first to roughly kiss her and suddenly words alone had no useful meaning.

He had dreamed of this a thousand times before, and had always dreamed of her as virginal and hapless and sweet. And now he laughed and groaned into her hungry, open mouth and wondered how on earth he could have thought that she would remain still and passive when they made love, however untouched she might be. Jo was Jo, no matter what a man might be doing to her, and she had no need whatsoever for hesitation or delicacy.

She was almost too rough to begin with, her palms nearly stinging him every time she applied pressure and worked her hands up and down his length, her writing calluses afire with heat. There was friction there already, a rough, raw sort of friction, one that made the want in him blaze up like madness in his blood as he shook and curved and thrust himself right into her fingers, the slick on them barely enough to make this more pleasurable than painful, barely enough to keep him from collapsing on her, his own digits blindly thrusting between her legs, not as gentle as he should be.

And he _should_ be more gentle about this, he knew-- he should be and he _would_ be. Only it was too damn hard to think when he could feel her grip around his shaft, her fingers flexing and then turning aquiline, her other hand groping against his shoulder, the blunt nails of it scratching welts up already--

With a low, animal grunt, he shifted his hand from between her legs to her hips, no longer trusting himself with what he was doing. Jo made that noise again, that noise that made him want to show no consideration whatsoever, and he could feel the tension build even higher in him, build irrevocably to a splintered heat.

"More," Laurie begged and beneath him, his wife laughed bravely and looped her fingers around his prick again, her thumb brushing his wet tip and making him pulse with ease.

"Show me," she whispered back, and when his hand abandoned her breast to cover her anxious fingers, all his blood pooled abruptly between his knees.

It was like thorns and brambles, what she did to him now, her hand bringing him both pain and pleasure in its rapid intensity. Thorns and brambles, edges and corners-- but he did not want her to cease in the least. Did not want, would not want, _could_ not want-- not when she was pressed so desperately to him, not when her fingers were working him so hard he knew her knuckles had to be white, not when she was letting him kiss her with barely more than his tongue and teeth. Not when stars were patterning themselves beneath his eyes because of the intensity of her sweet friction, when her authorial calluses were barely softened from her slick in their rough slide, not when he had wanted this for ages, not when she is letting him _do_ this to her, letting him so desperately _use_ her, her sweet palm arched up for his pleasure, her mouth open and whimpering--

It shouldn't have been enough for him, what they were now doing. After all these years, after a short lifetime from being the naive boy he had once been, the mere touch of her hand-- however slick, however solid, however warm and sweetly wicked-- shouldn't have been enough to satisfy his baser needs. He knew that even as he brought her hand between her thighs again, even as he showed her how to hold her fingers curved and alight, even as he showed her how to stroke him from base to tip as he shifted forward in her grip. He could even reach out for that knowledge as he arched up and grunted and sighed, so close to the edge he could feel it blacking the edges of his already dim sight, so close it was all he could not to-- to startle her or to-- surprise--

It shouldn't have been enough for him, he knew, even as his tendons felt as though they were melting into her hand, even as he dug his fingers into her hips and shuddered into her grip over and over, his nerves overloaded, his lungs burning, his thighs shaking with the effort of holding himself aloft and alight. It shouldn't have been, given it was merely her hand, and she barely even knew how to do this to him, barely had a hundredth of the expertise of some of his past women--

It shouldn't have been enough-- only this was _Jo_, his dream and his life and his world and his bride, and when had she ever _not_ been enough to surprise him entirely?

It only lasted about eight minutes from beginning to end, once his Jo had put her hand on him and made him arch into her helplessly. But it was a glorious eight minutes, full of heat and pleasure and madness and fire, minutes well worth treasuring. And after it was over and he had spent himself all over her fingers, he rested his face between her sweet breasts in the languid aftermath and laughed softly as she gasped audibly at the evidence of just how much she could make him feel.

"That," he began to whisper as soon as he could, "was... rather was... quite honestly... and absolutely..."

Jo made another hum now-- one of half-satisfaction and half-surprise-- and spoke up, her voice torn between amusement and astonishment. "Does that mean I did fine? Because if we tore up and soiled this nightgown for nothing, Meg really _will_ be angry."

"Oh God," he muttered, groaning against her neck, a little aghast at the worst post-coital pillow talk he had ever witnessed up to and including this current deed. "Don't talk about her right now. Please don't talk about _anyone_ else right now. And that nightgown died for a good cause. You did amazingly. Astonishingly. Wonderfully. Exquisitely! You were so... I mean, Jo, you were _so_..."

"Thank you for all those adjectives," she returned as he continued to sputter, laughing against his neck softly. "And I think you've earned the right to take your blindfold off, if you'd like. I imagine it's already getting rather itc--"

She had barely finished saying the words before his hands were level with his brow, busy unraveling the damned thing. And when he was finally able to blink and reopen his dazed eyes, her plain, honest face swam into his gaze, her chestnut hair tangled and riotous and falling all over the place, freckles scattered on every limb not covered in torn lace, and a twist to her lips that suggested she wasn't sure whether to clout him or kiss him currently.

"--chy," Jo concluded and rolled her eyes. "Oh, Teddy. What am I supposed to do with you?"

He solved that dilemma for her by leaning over and taking her mouth with his again, not even closing his eyes as he did so, not willing to miss a single flutter of her long, dark lashes against her impossibly sharp bronze cheeks. And in another moment, Jo began to sigh and then her breath began to stutter as it fell hot and dry on his lips before he left her sweet tongue momentarily.

Although, Laurie smugly thought as she groaned and began to rock into him once more, that might have been because of the way he now slid his hands onto her hips and then to her thighs, his thumbs caressing the smooth velvet of her rear, lifting her slightly up and lifting her _open_, even as he took advantage of her momentarily speechlessness to descend down her body.

"You can do," he replied-- and his grin was on _this_ side of wicked-- "whatever you want with me."

And then he was descending down to his knees and a beat later, he was kissing a line of fire from her curled toes ascending. Lips light and mouth burning, he went up the arch of her foot, up the curve of her ankle, up the perfect line of her leg and the velvet of her inner thigh, and then into the dark nestled curls that hid the heart of her momentarily--

He spread her out between his finger-tips as she cried out and rocked suddenly toward him, hasty, urgent, _needing_. And then he had her raw and exposed and wholly open, and she made a noise half-way between a gasp and a sigh, as though not sure what to feel.

"Such as in this way, for example," he added, gave her shivering thigh a kiss for reassurance, and then bent down even further to lend her the warmth of his mouth and the bite of his cool, sharp teeth.

He had, after all, promised that he'd make up for his bout of selfishness on his very knees.

Which of course didn't mean he wasn't a little nervous himself as he went on, hoping he could actually pull off his impulsive actions. After all, he had never done this particular act often before; even for someone of his experiences, something about it seemed a little... well, wrong, a little off, and more than a little obscene. There was something strange and undignified in the idea of a gentleman bending down to pleasure a woman who had introduced God only knew what else into her body before he had even found her through mutual 'friends' or in a saloon, ready to begin entertaining.

No, he hadn't done this often before, and only once to completion previously. He had thought it strange and disquieting and quite disliked, and never did it more than the rare times he felt he had to, to make up for something.

Calling Jo's name out accidentally in coitus was usually his most common misdeed.

Only this was Jo herself and she trusted him to do right by her and he would not be-- he could _never_ be-- selfish when she gave of herself so freely.

So he took her with his lips now, slowly and leisurely, as though he knew exactly what he was doing. His own need temporarily extinguished, his own desires momentarily banished, he concentrated on her with the ardor of a man who had his dreams quite literally bucking under him presently and wanted nothing more than to please it until it was pleading. Senses prickling from the textures of her and his mouth at the ready, he began to lap at the damp folds between her legs tentatively, hoping he was doing enough to compensate for his selfishness earlier and the pain he might well inflict later on in the evening.

And maybe something about his impulsive attempt to please her _was_ still obscene. Maybe he ought to be ashamed of himself for introducing something like this on his wedding night and exposing his innocent wife to such things. Maybe he'd gone to the devil and was now dragging her with him, degrading her in some way by even showing her what could be.

Only this was _Jo_ and he wanted the best for her, wanted to somehow simultaneously possess and protect. He wanted to make this night _good_ for her, not merely something worth enduring.

So he kissed her in the space between her legs, feeling her arch as he moved her slim thighs to his shoulders, feeling the grain of her skin slide past his cheeks as he moved against and into her, feeling himself being welcomed to her, safe and warm in the circle of her body.

And so he licked his way right through to the tight rings of muscle that were clenching rhythmically to his every action, feeling her thighs shake at every flick his tongue made at her and her lips whimper every time he introduced himself to some delicate new crevice of her anatomy.

And so he stroked her as gently as he could with his practiced fingers, trying to make up for his rougher touches earlier, his fingertips light and fleeting as he felt her inner muscles contract and clench as he was accepted by her, her cries echoing through his ears.

So he did the best he could by her presently, kissing and licking and stroking his way through, feeling just as blind as he was before even though he could see every little fall of her flesh as she rose against him, her body speckled and sweet. He did all he could and somehow, even as his lips and teeth and tongue continued to move within her, he soon found himself shaking as well, as though his own blood were back on fire, although he was doing nothing more than kneeling down and trying to love her as best as he could.

Laurie did his best and soon, with a sudden shock, he realized she wasn't merely babbling to herself, that she was actually saying something.

"Oh God," she was saying-- and he had to bite his busy tongue not laugh and break his concentration now-- "Oh God, oh God, _Teddy_..."

"I know I'm good," he mumbled between stray kisses and caresses, "but Jo, I'm not actually a _deity_." And then, more seriously, as he flicked his eyes up and gazed at her, looking past the acres and acres of pale skin bared just for him to meet gray eyes that were staring down at him bravely. "Do you like this? Or would you rather I stopped? I'm not sure what you want right now and..."

And when her hands unclenched from their position coiled into her dark hair to slide into his, forcing his mouth back to her velvety sweetness, her nails dragging against his already abused neck--

Well, at least it was enough to let him know what she wanted him keep doing.

So he pressed himself to her again, the taste of her flooding his mouth, strangely warm and bitter-sweet. He pressed himself to her and he began licking once more, his fingers threading themselves into her all over, blind and hesitant no longer, slow but still loving. He pressed and he licked and he kissed and he caressed and soon enough, he found himself lost inside her again, his back sloping as he worked at her, feeling her thighs pressed tight against his shoulders, feeling as much as hearing her beginning to keen. He pressed on, even as she moved sharply against him, using what little momentum she had to meet his thrusts as his teeth still grasped at the velvety folds of her inner self, his tongue sliding from the very end of her slit to the raised swell at the very beginning...

And then he realized she wasn't merely sinking her nails into his neck for the hell of it; that she was trying to _tell_ him something.

"I can even... feel your eyelashes," Jo whispered now, and her voice seemed to surge a thousand different ways as her body arched and changed against his mouth and the sound of her filtered down to his burning ears. "I can even... your... God, _Teddy_... I can even feel..."

And then she bucked right against his mouth, her fingers scrambling for purchase on the settee as she shuddered momentarily, the passage his fingers had been scissoring inside seizing as her inner muscles contracted and her thighs went rigid, as though all the world was now writhing between her knees--

And just like that, she wiped all his notions of shame and doubt away very cleanly.

He lifted his eyes up to look at her as she trembled from sheer pleasure for the first time, his slippery thumb pressed against her core to extend her pleasure as he looked on, his other fingers working against her lightly. And if ever he had had hesitations about what he had done to her, they were spirited away just then, as he saw her shuttered face as she shuddered her first release, her brilliant eyes closed but her wet mouth half open, her summer-tanned skin flushed and afire with heat.

She was, he realized even as his fingers continued stroking her, just about the loveliest and strangest thing he had ever seen. And though she might well be driving him to madness now, it wasn't at all one he would wish to wake up from eventually.

By the time she had finished, she was in his arms again, and he was back to kissing her sweet, warm mouth and stroking her face clean of a few stray tears. She shuddered as she tasted him on her tongue but did not push him away, not now and never again, hopefully. Instead, shivering as though the humid heat of the summer night could not touch her, she wrapped her own arms against him and pressed her flushed brow to his collarbone, as though feeling unaccountably guilty.

"If I knew that feeling like _that_ was possible..." Jo began to murmur and then turned even redder than before, her mouth pursing itself into a sudden, strict line, as though she now imagined the spirits of a very stern Marmee and Meg spiraling around them suddenly. It was enough to make her husband chuckle against her, his fingers working up and down her spine and shoulders, as though to massage boldness back into her body.

"If you knew?" Laurie asked, not even bothering to hide his amusement. "And what would you have done, Mrs. Laurence? Would you have glided into my arms the first time I asked you to, at the age of two-and-twenty?"

"Keep talking like that and I'll glide _you_ somewhere far less pleasant," Jo muttered, although he could still feel the blush on her cheeks when she pressed them to his shoulders. And then, a moment later, after her reflexive annoyance had evaporated, she muttered, "I might have given the whole 'literary spinster' bit a little less consideration, is all. Please don't get all smug on me."

"Indeed?" Laurie asked, but grinned before she could take offense, moving onto another topic entirely. "So... you mentioned feeling like _this_, which implies you enjoyed it. Does that mean you want me to revisit this position on some other eve?"

Jo turned the bright pink of her mother's geraniums in the spring time and though Laurie knew she might very well take his life right now, it would be worth it to see her at a loss for words before he left the world.

"That isn't-- that wasn't quite--" she began, stopped, sputtered and started, her fever-bright eyes promising him a dire vengeance eventually. And then, in a furtive tone of voice that suggested she might have thought her family could hear them from miles away, she whispered, "Are you sure it would be... _acceptable_ for us to do this regularly?"

He tipped his head back and laughed as though he hadn't been asking himself the same question before he found out just how much pleasure he could bring to her with his mouth. "Jo," he said through his laughter, "we're wedded and bedded now! We can do anything we please! Good God, if you wanted to hoist me naked atop a giant sling-shot and then launch me toward another landmass by force, it would be perfectly acceptable method of showing our love for one another."

Jo paused and looked at him with an expression that suggested she was reevaluating her decision to spend a lifetime chained to his side.

He grinned cheekily back at her in turn. "I was only speaking hypothetically."

And then, possibly because she loved to keep him on his toes about her, Jo surprised him by tipping her own head back and laughing herself, although she shook her head and glossy hair at him as she did so, as though torn between between giving him a clout or a kiss.

Not that it surprised Laurie. Between them, this was simply how life was meant to be.

Luckily for him, she chose the latter, raising her face from his collar to press her lips against his softly. And after he finished weaving his fingers through her hair once more and she had pulled away from entwining his wicked tongue with hers, her eyes were bright and her face was wavering and her shoulder was tense as his hand eased down on its sharp curve, wanting to feel all of her.

"Is it going to hurt a great deal?" Jo finally whispered softly.

It took him a moment to realizing what she was speaking of, even when the impossibly silky skin of her inner thigh began caressing his erection furtively. He had been only half-hard earlier, the memory of her fingers on him enough to give him patience as he had leaned over to attend to her. But now she was here and _he_ was here and her hands were shyly touching his bare chest and he could feel every flex and ripple in the muscles of her leg as it brought him back to desire again nearly effortlessly.

He wanted to say no, no, he wouldn't hurt her, he could _never_, not when he wanted her so. That he would somehow find a way to make it painless and easy.

Only this was Jo and she had been so damned _taut_ even around his fingers and he wasn't about to lie, never and not to her, not now and here.

"I have no idea," Laurie whispered back honestly, wishing he could tell her more. "I've certainly never _been_ a woman before and... well, truth be told, you're the first person I've ever thought to deflower."

Jo winced at that last word as soon as it exited his lips and he wished he could take it back at once, although he'd said nothing false.

In another minute, though, he learned he wouldn't have to as she remembered her courage presently. And all of a sudden, her eyes were even darker, her smile was even firmer, and that face of hers was resolute again, her shoulders stern and upright once more.

"Then let's find out together," she said, and her voice did not waver though it went soft. "I'm yours and you're mine and I want this with you, no matter what I feel afterward. As long as it's with _you_, Teddy. As long as you're with me."

If he didn't already love her, he probably would have learned how to do so now, as she looked all her love at him so easily, as though it were simply in her nature. And when he stood and looped his arms around her to lift her up and carry her off, her body felt smooth and soft and sure under his hands, no longer even trembling.

"That's the spirit," he murmured, and smiled radiantly at her as he carried her to bed, not hiding his pleasure in the least. "And remember... if you really dislike it, you can always take it out on my mangy hide later. I'd probably deserve any given punishment that creative mind of yours can think of afterwards, dear Josephine."

"Theodore Laurence, you incorrigible romantic, you," she said, and smiled shyly again as he set her down onto their bride-bed at last, her chestnut hair gleaming in the last rays of the candlelight as it shone down on them both. "Where _did_ you get that silver tongue of yours? I bet it works on all the lovely ladies."

"Special mail order," he assured her, his fingers already unbuttoning the remaining few stretches of her nightgown, easing the last of the bedraggled cloth off her. "Although now that we're married, I imagine you'll have to bear the brunt of it. Do you suppose you'll prove strong enough?"

And when her fingers found their way to his curls and dragged him down to take in her soft, searching kiss, Laurie learned just how strong she could be.

***

Afterward, he knew he would remember a few details for all the rest of his life, no matter how long it stretched out, no matter at what else he might endeavor.

He would always remember, for one, the feel of her hands as they settled on his shoulders, holding him close to her, her nails sharp against his throat as her fingertips had eased over and explored him with gentle, unsteady fingers. He would always be able to recall the way she had let him frame her face with kisses, the way she had glided her hands across the ripples of his ribs, the way she had tipped her head back and trusted him with the curve of her throat, the imprint of her delicate eyelashes stuttering on his cheeks as she had given herself up and over.

He would always remember the noises she had made, the little sighs she had given, the way she had groaned as he had first pressed into her thighs and then across the dark curls between them, before finding his way down and inside of her. He would never forget the way she had winced at his first lunge before smoothing out her face into raw tenderness, her lips exploring his jaw as she whispered _yes,_ and _yes_ and _oh please yes_, tangling her legs around his hips until he trembled from all the signs of her trust.

He would always remember the knots her fingers made on his back as he had found himself deep within her skin, the way she had whispered _come on_ and then _move already, you twit_, and the 'o' her lips had made as he had finally pressed on as his heart beat furiously against her shoulder. He would hold it in his memory the way he would the taste of her mouth as he had drawn a map of it with his tongue, kissing her in time to the rocking, roiling rhythm of their forms, pressed to each other as fiercely as they dared until the spiraling heat between them overspilled soon after.

He would always remember the feel of her, the way she responded so eagerly to his every press and caress, her body so shaped to his that it brought him both pain and pleasure. It was as near and dear as the way she had lifted her hand to touch his cheek when he had withdrawn from her, only moments before he spent himself over her bared skin, her body so soft it felt like sin as she curved into his last thrust.

And most of all, he would always remember how afterward she looked to him with shining eyes, how in the aftermath she eased him down to her with a kiss and surprised smile, how wordless and weightless and with no guile, she had shown him that he was loved.

***

Laurie found himself stroking her hair in the soft aftermath, strands of it as heavy and lustrous as satin slipping through his gentle fingers. His body sated and his mind finally at ease, it was all he could do not to fall asleep right against the lovely line of her shoulder. However, if he knew nothing else about women, he knew that falling asleep on them during a first time together-- let alone on a wedding night-- was very poor form. And knowing Jo, showing as much would probably lead her to form a posse of strong-willed March women who would later hunt him down like a dog.

Besides, he still hadn't finished teasing her for how 'angry' she had thought a certain part of him to be earlier. So with a light, lazy smile, he reached over to press a kiss to her delicate, fluttering eyelids and whispered: "Hello, Mrs. Laurence. How do you do for now?"

She didn't reply for so long, Laurie had ample time to wonder if she had fallen asleep herself. But finally her eyelashes fluttered open and she gazed rather hazily at him, and halfway through a full-bodied yawn, she said, "Quite well, Mr. March."

"...Mrs. Laurence," he replied (and could not hide his smile), "I know I'm quite good at the art of love but I've never been able to erase a woman's memory in bed before, no matter _how_ well I pleased her."

"Maybe," she suggested, halfway to laughing herself, "marriage has given you special powers."

"Probably," he confessed agreeably, his fingertips now moving to brush the corners of her sweet mouth. "I must admit, this night has left me feeling invigorated indeed. I bet if you asked me to, mmm, I don't know, become a dark, strange figure of the night and attempt some heroic rescues, I could carry it off."

"And I'm sure you'd be dashing," Jo said, agreeably, lifting herself up to smooth thin covers over their bodies and then nuzzling against him once more, her shoulder against the beat of his heart. "Though I fail to understand why would I want you to do as much when I could have you curled up here with me."

"It's just a thought," he murmured, every breath he took bringing in the scent of her hair, redolent of their past hour. "And why, Mrs. Laurence, are you calling me Mr. March when you know your last name is mine as well now?"

"I thought it was only fair," she explained, her voice already growing drowsy and a little faded, their antics apparently finally getting to her. "If I take your name, you take mine. It's like an exchange of sorts."

"Well, that's fair enough," he said, and then, after waiting several seconds in which she felt curiously silent, asked: "My dear Mrs. Laurence? Have you fallen asleep?"

"...It's sort of in the plan, yes," she muttered, after a few more seconds, sounding somewhat disgruntled at him for his interruption. "Or at least, sweet Teddy, it _was_."

"Ah," he replied, feeling a little abashed. "Then don't allow me discourage you. You are quite tolerable when you slumber."

Even with his eyes closed, he could _feel_ her looking back and staring at him.

"That... is one of the more interesting compliments I have ever garnered, Mr. March."

"I assure you, Mrs. Laurence, it is a heart-felt one." And then he sighed a little anxiously next to her and went more solemnly on. "And I didn't hurt you, did I, Jo? I hope you're all right after our... well... night together. I know I might have been a little too... well... too _passionate_..."

She snorted in a way that sounded far too amused and very far from being afraid or alarmed. "And just what would you do if I were to tell you I actually _was_ experiencing grievous bodily harm?"

Knowing what she sounded like when she felt fit to tease him, Laurie found himself chuckling, relaxing and smoothing out his fingers over her slow-beating heart. "Is that a challenge I hear, Mrs. Laurence? Do you expect me to climb the ranges of Mount Everest in compensation, or hie myself off to India to take care of bereaved orphans forever?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of bringing me breakfast in bed tomorrow, Mr. March," Jo murmured fuzzily, slumping seemingly boneless next to him, already close to drifting to sleep. "And I feel quite all right but I imagine I ought to milk your sympathy while I still have it. You're probably going to turn all stern and dictatorial and husbandly with me after the merry chase I gave you for a few years straight..."

"Absolutely," Laurie promised, as though he wouldn't have gone off to fetch the moon for her if she had asked for it right now. "I'm planning on being an absolute terror to you so you may as well enjoy your peace while you can. I'm very much going to enjoy having you cower under my heel."

And he supposed Jo would have said something in return were it not for the fact she was already beginning to snore, the strange, fluting whistle sound of it once more ringing in his ears, becoming ever more familiar and loved and known.

Which didn't mean he had run out of words, of course. He never could, not with her around, being precisely as bewitching and wonderful and downright maddening as he had always known she would be once she was in his arms. It only meant that when he whispered his last three words of this night he would never forget, it would be nearly noiselessly into her ears as she lay dreaming, her heart covered by his palm.

And then Laurie pressed his face to his wife's hair and went to sleep as well.

***

**Author's Note**: As always, reviews area greatly loved and appreciated. Please do let me know if you liked my first completed series if you've finished it. It'll make me keep working hard on updates. ;)


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